More than half alive   (Wed Oct 31 2007)

Exciting times! Real people are beginning to work with real data in ACCELERATE HR.

Our project's already well under way with over 400 people already at work on the Abu Dhabi Circuit, and the numbers are due to rise quickly. To get things up and running, I've used my existing desktop HR package, PROSPERO to enter all the basic data, and to run the first three payrolls. But PROSPERO isn't the long-term answer, and we decided not to introduce a pretty complex package to the HR team and then a couple of months later, start all over again with ACCELERATE.

So for the time being, the team is using Excel worksheets that they've patched together. Then as we near payroll time, they pass all the data to me for upload into PROSPERO, and out a payroll emerges. It's a pretty unsatisfactory process. The team's good, but no matter how good you are, it's too easy for errors to creep in when you're working with unvalidated spreadsheets. Then there are the little problems that can become big headaches. I knew that there was an issue with some people entering dates in US format (month-day-year) and others in European format (day-month-year). To my horror a couple of nights ago I realized that all the dates had been entered as text strings rather than as dates. Dates of birth, passport and visa dates, hire dates, transfer dates - all of them needed to be checked and re-entered so that we had data we could work with.

That's why it's so important that we get the team onto ACCELERATE as quickly as possible - to cut out the errors, and slash the work-load. In particular the tedious entry of overtime and attendance. At the moment, the team's just about coping, but when staff numbers double, treble, quadruple .....

It's taken longer than I'd hoped to get all the set-up data and processes finalized in Accelerate. It wasn't so much the coding, more the planning. As you enter that new-hire's record, is everything set up and ready to go whether you're dealing with staff records, preparing the payroll, reading attendance records, preparing management reports, or generating standard documents? I needed to make sure that the foundations were solid. And today, although we're still right at the beginning as far as the modules are concerned, the table structure of the database is already virtually complete.

So this week Cebarco's HR manager has been checking all the basic set-up details. Have we got the right department and grade structure? Are the job titles correct? What about the standard benefits? How do we calculate the daily rate of pay? And the hourly rate for overtime?

Finally today, when I got the OK on the basic structure, I migrated 400 employee records from PROSPERO into ACCELERATE. From here on, the Abu Dhabi team is going to be able to enter details of their people (and their job-candidates) directly into ACCELERATE. Now I need to give the team database access and assign their rights. And then to move on quickly to attendance and overtime records.

Want to know how I saved myself a week of data entry as I migrated the data? Rails people - I'll be talking about that tomorrow.

Filed under: Implementation