Netcare has over 50 hospital sites with a total of 18000
employees in their hospital division. Each of these sites ran its
own payroll, totally independently from each other. There were very
limited and in some instances no computerised HR systems in place.
There was no consolidated information available to Head Office.
Procedures and methods of pay were not standardised.
They implemented the Payroll, Leave and HR Modules of Vision
in
2002 and adopted a phased approach. They installed a centralised
database at Head Office with each hospital having access to its own
data and taking responsibility for its own payroll and HR
administration. They focused on the payroll and interfaces to their
time and attendance system first, following on with the
implementation of the Human Resource modules.
Since the initial implementation, their Medicross and Traumalink
divisions have also been implemented, increasing the total number
of employees to over 22000.
The benefit it has had at Netcare is that there are now standard
procedures in place across the organisation. This has not only
streamlined their processes, but has eased the training of staff.
Top management has access to accurate and reliable statistics and
reports for the entire company, while individual managers have
access to their own areas of accountability. They are able to do
labour costing forecasts based on hours worked on a monthly
basis.
They are successfully managing all payroll, leave, training
(including their Training Academies), employee development &
career management, performance management, employment relations and
employment equity on Vision. Hospitals are able to define and
extract their information for EE and Skills Development reporting,
which cascades up to the Regional, Divisional and Organisational
levels. The full integration between modules has ensured
legislative reporting is accurate and easily extracted.
In 2005 they launched their HR Shared Service Centre. This
centre includes: a fully Centralised Payroll Input System; an
Employee Interaction Call Centre; a Management Self Service system
(to provide access to the personal details of staff reporting to
them; and an Employee Self Service system (to provide employees
with access to their own personal data).
"As a result of these new facilities, HR departments
in our hospitals around South Africa will be able to give greater
focus to more strategic HR management issues. This is a decision
that will transform our division and have benefits for all our
internal customers in terms of improved efficiency and service
delivery; from ensuring that our policies and processes are applied
consistently, and benchmarking our best HR practices, to promoting
the more effective alignment of our HR strategy to our business
strategy."
Carolyn Blunden - HR Head (2005)
The transformation of the Netcare Payroll and HR processes
includes:
- Streamlined and standardised HR and Payroll processes.
- Reduction in their complement of payroll administrators by
about half.
- Reduction in the administrative processes such as third party
payments by replacing individual hospital payments with a single
global payment.
- Balancing of payroll for the entire organisation has been
streamlined.
- Information for finance is easily extracted per site, region,
division or the entire organisation.
- Transfers between hospitals / sites managed without losing
employee history.
- Share schemes for the entire organisation managed on Vision,
with full integration with payroll.
- Time and attendance records are imported and used to benchmark
manpower costs per site, region, division and the entire
organisation.
- Variance reporting on short / overtime hours vs normal
hours.
- Management of and legislative extracts for EE, Skills
Development, and all other aspects of HR and Payroll for the
Company, cascaded down to Divisions, Regions, Sites and
Individuals.
- Live records of full history of all pay, leave and HR related
information since 2003.