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Up until 1993, we had no computer system
at all for personnel records. There was nothing other than files
in a filing cabinet. And we had nothing inhouse for payroll. We
used an external bureau to process pay details and send them back.
If we wanted any information based on those details, we had to pay
through the nose – it was very inflexible.
What we wanted was to be able to create
organisational ‘snapshots’ of certain key features of our workforce,
which we couldn’t do originally without a huge amount of work. We
wanted to understand what the profile of our workforce looked like,
in terms of age, male/female ratios, travel to work distances, length
of service and so forth.
Our sites are open all year round, seven
days a week and a lot of our holiday offerings are short breaks,
so we don’t have a seasonal variation in staffing levels during
the year.
The biggest difference is probably between
mid-week and weekend demand. That means our workforce is very varied
in terms of the number of hours people work. For example, if a full-time
person leaves, they could be replaced by two people, each of them
working 20 hours.
Keeping track of the contract make-up
of each department so that we could look at budgets was hard. Because
of the numbers of people we employ, and the fact they are on four
different sites, it could take some time to establish quite basic
information.
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Human Resource Management Systems