South American retailer streamlines HR operations, saves $30 million annually

When you’re one of the largest retail conglomerates managing some of the biggest brands in South America, you’re always striving for success. This retail giant prides itself on providing the best shopping experience to customers with exclusive private brands and thousands of brick and mortar stores. With annual retail sales in the billions, this organisation employs tens of thousands of people.

To operate at such a high level, this retailer needs to keep an eye on many moving parts. One of the biggest areas to manage is human resources (HR). Over the last few years, retailers were hit particularly hard in terms of employee turnover and layoffs. While managing layoffs and terminations is never easy, this retailer needed a way to better handle the annual $100 million in labour lawsuits that came from this time. To do this, it determined that its unstructured HR records needed an upgrade to make the legal process more efficient and facilitate the flow of information enabling easier access to the right people.

Challenge

It’s not uncommon for HR departments to manage a mix of physical and digital employee records. However, this can result in separate systems and inefficient processes. Employee records are the best way to get a comprehensive picture of current or former staff members. These files include everything from initial contract negotiation details, performance reviews, benefit selections, and more. But with so many employees and high turnover, there’s bound to be room for improvement in HR operations— this retailer was no different. Its internal HR operations were unstructured, which resulted in:

• Lack of efficiency across departments
• Lengthy document lead time of 30 to 90 days
• No embedded business rules
• No automatic push notifications

Without a more advanced system installed or a secure end-to-end process in place, there was no way to notify anyone of government mandated documents for employees when there was a layoff or termination. Because people had to manually look for records, it was tougher to find the right information, get it into the right hands, and make informed decisions.

Solution

To appropriately manage and adhere to labour laws, this retailer knew it needed to have its employee records more organised. This would help streamline any activity, but more importantly, it would efficiently get the right information to the right people. And perhaps, enable them to be more strategic in their legal efforts. To help, this retailer chose the Iron Mountain Human Resources solution, which worked to integrate employee information across five distinctly separate systems. This software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution helped automate any escalation notices of process delays, including missing employee files, and swift document retrieval. By implementing the Iron Mountain Human Resources solution, the retailer was able to:

• Securely access HR records in the cloud
• Boost collaboration and productivity through automated workflows
• Integrate with eSignature and existing HR systems
• Help meet legal retention obligations through Iron Mountain Policy Centre

By bringing everything together in one location, lawyers and HR reps could more easily access information at any time from anywhere. In turn, they could better prepare for any potential labour disputes.

Benefits

After implementing the Iron Mountain Human Resources solution, this retail organisation was able to speed up its processes. By integrating its systems into one source of truth and providing real-time access to employee records, it has a more cohesive approach to responding to and resolving legal matters. More specifically, this retailer achieved:

• 30% reduction in financial losses totalling a $30 million savings
• Reduced HR document lifecycle from 90 days to less than 10 days
• Aggressive liability reduction (35%) with new workflow
• Customised management reports for continuous monitoring