Large county enhances efficiency and optimizes human resources information system
Learn how an HR assessment helped a local government automate tasks, evaluate workflows and centralize data to enhance efficiency and decision-making.
Client background
This organization is one of the largest counties in the United States with more than 950,000 residents and includes a mixture of metropolitan, suburban and rural living.
The county’s Department of Human Resources supports more than 40 departments and utilizes a Human Resources Information System (HRIS) to facilitate its key activities, including payroll, workforce management, talent management and performance management. Additionally, employees across other departments utilize the HRIS system in their day-to-day work.
The business challenge
The county faced significant challenges during their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software implementation and was unable to leverage their ERP software for human resource (HR) functions, which led to the decision to migrate to a new Human Resources Information System (HRIS) platform. The primary goal during implementation was to replicate the legacy system's functionality within six months and optimize later. However, implementation of the new HRIS platform struggled to meet the county's needs, resulting in issues such as poor data accuracy, challenges with job and position management and historical data retrieval, lack of integration, workflow inefficiencies and limited reporting capabilities. This situation drove the county to seek an independent current state assessment.
Strategy and solution
Baker Tilly supported the county in conducting an assessment of current Dayforce challenges. Five scenarios were identified and reviewed to investigate the county’s challenges. These scenarios involved examining the relationships of data fields across multiple systems, spreadsheets, organizational chart inaccuracies and data reporting capabilities by interviewing stakeholders across six departments.
Following the interviews, workshops and analysis of documentation, Baker Tilly worked with the cross-functional team to identify initiatives that would help the county to optimize their HRIS platform based on a root cause analysis of how their organizational structure was originally implemented, and included:
- Reconfigure the organizational structure to provide the needed visibility to the right levels
- Simplify and standardize job management by using job assignments
- Reduce the number of manual jobs by leveraging job assignments for similar jobs in different departments and automating job updates
- Re-evaluate workflows and implement reports to track and monitor approvals
- Incorporation of contractor management to improve asset management
- Centralized source of truth data by bringing data into a data warehouse
These post- implementation recommendations will help the county achieve better data management, efficient processes and informed decision-making.