Evolving digitally with HR automation

Industry

Retail

Challenge

A national consumer retailer needed to move from a system that no longer met their needs and automate HR processes in order to increase efficiency and streamline workflows.

Solution

Iron Mountain Human Resources Solution

Value

• Converted outdated, disparate manual workflows to unified automated processes.
• Document processing became more efficient, more accurate and faster.
• Motivated the organisation to explore how automation and digitisation might benefit other business lines.
• Enabled them to modernise their HR repository

Evolve for efficiency

Human Resources is a document heavy department in any organisation. Onboarding, leave requests, benefits administration, employee reviews and workers’ compensation claims are all processed through Human Resources (HR) — and that’s not an exhaustive list. A larger and distributed organisation has dedicated groups that oversee the different aspects of HR administration. This organisation noticed that, over time, these groups had each developed their own workflows. The HR staff had a clear vision of what they wanted in a new platform. They looked for a solution that would:

• increase efficiency
• provide a centralised access point for all HR documents
• unify and automate workflows
• offer a high level of continued support
• enable a smooth transition for their workforce

Addressing the disparate workflows and streamlining processes throughout HR was one of their main goals. With HR documents divided amongst different groups and spread across various shared drives they needed a way to centralise all that information.

HR documents contain a wealth of Personal Identifiable Information (PII). Tracking and protecting their employees’ sensitive data was difficult because that information was spread across multiple shared drives. Locating documents was overly time consuming. Managing the visibility and retention of those documents was onerous. Finding a solution that created a central repository was crucial because the manual process was both cumbersome and prone to human error.

The right tool for many jobs

Adapting to an entirely new way of working is never easy and to make the change worthwhile the company wanted a platform that offered a high level of support. Their own IT staff was already at capacity; supporting a wide variety of internal projects. In addition, they also sought to capitalise on available automated technologies.

To make the investing of overhauling the entire department worth it, the organisation needed to be sure they could customise the new platform to fit the unique complexities of how the various HR teams functioned. The software as a solution (SaaS) platform that ticked all their boxes was Iron Mountain Human Resources solution.

A whole new way of working

Choosing a new solution is only half the battle…or maybe only a quarter of it. Implementing that solution is the hard part. The implementation struggle often stems from having a short amount of time to restructure an entire department to a totally foreign system. Many of those common new system anxieties were avoided due to how customisable this platform is to the specific needs of each organisation.

But, in order to benefit from this adaptability each organisation must designate an internal resource who will work with an Iron Mountain solutions architect to build out a tailored solution. In order to get the most out of the platform the internal expert should be intimately familiar with the old system, know the user base, recognise the potential of the software and understand how the new system should function.

The partnership between the internal expert and the Iron Mountain services team led to the creation of a bespoke platform for the organisation. The HR staff had a considerable amount of time to get familiar with the new, customised platform before going live with the change in workflow. The customisations and long, hands-on training period made the transition to the updated solution run smoothly.

Digital business done well

This organisation left behind an outdated, manual system and updated to a more efficient, modern platform that empowered them to work more digitally.

The solution’s dashboard has created an entirely new level of visibility into their department, enabling higher-level metrics and analytics. Processes have been streamlined and unified throughout the department. HR documents are centrally located in a digital repository — so they are both easier to locate and to manage. The margin for human error has been significantly reduced and when mistakes do happen, safeguards are in place so issues are flagged and corrected in real time. The new platform gave the staff the ability to focus more on the people and less on the paperwork. Iron Mountain Human Resources is a solution capable of meeting complex needs in a digital world.