Introduction
The chosen organization is the Colorado Community College System (CCCS), which is the largest higher education system in Colorado. It has thirteen community colleges serving almost 110,000 students every year. The organization had some problems with tracking timesheet processes and employee leave. Particularly, they faced the following problems: inaccurate data, the control over the information compensation, time-consuming, and the lack of reporting.
Thus, the first reason deals with storing paper forms, routing, and manual filing, which lead to misplaced forms and data entry errors. As a result, it takes very much time for employees and HR managers to correct all mistakes return the lost timesheet, or make a replacement. The second reason is that the system based on using paper is not reliable, especially in terms of knowing if the employees took time off without making a report or not.
As a result, there were cases that some employees took a paid out leave and did not report whether they took it or not. The third reason is that the system based on using paper is also time-consuming and is prone to generate quite a lot of errors. As a result, the employees spend too much time not only on completing the process but also on correcting the mistakes. The fourth reason is that HR personnel is not able to efficiently and quickly carry out the HR reporting at the end of a month without exceeding data entry, dealing with employee inquiries, and managing lost forms.
The Solution
CCCS chose the Ultimus’ approach in order to solve its problems. Particularly, they use the Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite to make timesheet and leave processes automated. The results of the program that was first implemented at Pueblo Community College (PCC) and at the system office of CCCS showed the decrease in leave time abuse, the elimination of the equivalent of one full-time employee, and the increase in productivity of HR personnel and other employees.
This automated process stores timesheet and leave request forms online, thereby enabling the employees to easily and quickly fill them in and send them to the HR department. The system ensures the correct and complete information submission. It also efficiently processes all the requests so as to make sure that the HR department has accurate and clear information on which they report at the end of a month. Additionally, the program provides the HR personnel with visibility of the process so as to ensure that all the employees are paid and take vacations according to the rules.
Due to the positive results, after the implementation of the program in the CCCS’s offices mentioned above, the organization decided to integrate this program into the work of its other offices and for other tasks. These other tasks include conference rooms rentals, new hire processes, travel expense reporting, requests for a travel authorization, and so on. Currently, CCCS is looking forward to increasing the productivity and visibility throughout different other spheres of their education system.
Success Factors
In my opinion, the two main success factors of the BPM program implementation are the systematization and the transition to the electronic version. Thus, systematization helped put all information in order, thereby eliminating the time-consuming factor, as the HR employees do not need to search for some document for a long time. Regarding the transition to the electronic version, in my opinion, it is the primary factor, as it significantly increases overall productivity, eliminates time-consuming factors, and makes every operation connected with filling in and storing certain documents much more convenient.