Human Resources

The human resources (HR) staff must address a number of important issues, including:

• Streamlining the internal and external recruitment process.
• Providing an easy-to-use, attractive way for employees to locate, access and understand employment and benefits information, policies and procedures.
• Making it easy for employees to enroll in various benefits and programs.
• Keeping employees informed about their company.

Traditionally, HR information has been distributed on paper making it difficult, time-consuming and expensive to keep current. With information changing continually, the HR department must produce and distribute bulky manuals and update them frequently. In some cases, information is obsolete even before employees receive it. In fact, information changes so frequently that many IS departments have been unable to deploy HR application systems on employee computers cost-effectively.

Employees find it difficult to juggle up-to-date benefits and policy manuals and to find the information they need and managing the constant barrage of updates is time-consuming. When employees have questions, they typically call HR instead of searching through the manuals. This means the HR staff spends valuable time answering routine, repetitive questions, such as,"Which options are available in the health plan?" and"What are the current share prices of the mutual funds in the 401k plan?"

Enrollment is also an issue. Once employees have made their choices, they must wade through tedious forms and deliver them to HR, where the HR staff manually sorts and re-enters the information in a data entry application. As a result, benefits enrollment periods are onerous to employees and require a tremendous effort on the part of HR personnel. During open enrollments, other essential tasks are often put on hold while the HR staff contacts employees and updates data.

The Intranet Solution

An Intranet creates a single, secure repository for all confidential HR information and processes. It can provide an easy-to-navigate environment that is accessible by all employees, regardless of where they are located or which computing platform they are using. Access rights for each employee are established by HR and are typically determined by the level of management of the employee and the department they are in or their key job functions. The HR staff maintains information online, so updates are fast, straightforward and easy to manage. Employees have immediate access to the latest information. Employees use a simple browser interface to find what they need, so they spend less time searching and can focus on precisely the information they need. They aren't overwhelmed by cumbersome manuals, and they save time because they don't have to wade through pages of irrelevant information. To make things even more efficient, employees can enter data online. This data can be automatically integrated into back-end information systems, so it can be validated on input, eliminating errors. In addition, the HR staff does not have to re-enter employee data, freeing up time for other more important tasks.

Human Resources Applications

Engineering

Engineering management faces significant challenges in addressing important issues, including:

• Enabling developers to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge and expertise available within the organization.
• Managing complex development projects involving multiple teams and departments that may be spread across different geographical locations.
• Establishing and maintaining effective version control.
• Access to online data libraries and repositories.

The engineering process depends heavily on easy access to a broad library of technical information and resources, usually spread across diverse and changing platforms, teams and geographic locations. In addition to technical information, engineers need access to information from a variety of other functional areas, such as field problem reports from customer service, marketing information that could influence design and quality issues that could be easily corrected by design changes. Accessing and consolidating this information requires significant time and effort. Paper-based information, such as engineering drawings and engineering change orders (ECOs), is cumbersome and costly to distribute and update. Other information may be stored in multiple databases, making it difficult to access and consolidate.

Engineering management must establish, update, consolidate and communicate many interdependent project schedules that are constantly changing. Projects often involve multiple development groups in different locations and time zones. Collaboration and coordination are complex to manage. In-person meetings may be impractical, and time differences often make telephone conferences difficult to schedule. And resource libraries are difficult to synchronize between teams, often resulting in increased QA expenditures and slower time to market.

The Intranet Solution

Intranets give engineering departments the technology they need for workgroup communication and collaboration, document and resource control and project management. Engineers can share files easily through the network. Newsgroups, e-mail, chat, groupware and multimedia technologies facilitate communication and collaboration. Corporate Intranets also provide a means of centralizing, consolidating, publishing and updating project information that changes frequently. The engineering department benefits from a dramatic reduction in paper as well as more effective version control. Management can consolidate information that resides on a variety of sources so the engineering staff can take full advantage of the corporate knowledgebase in real time.

Engineering Applications

Customer Service & Support

Because of the key front-line function performed by customer service and support employees, their management is faced with issues including:

• Empowering service and support representatives to provide fast and effective response to customers, in most cases in real-time while the customer is on the telephone or online.
• Giving representatives instant access to up-to-date information, consolidated from multiple data sources.
• Providing immediate problem escalation.
• Capturing information on the fly and adding it to the appropriate databases and knowledgebases.

Service and support personnel are the first line of contact and have the most frequent interaction with customers. Each representative may handle a variety of customer calls including inquiries, data updates, operational questions and problem resolution. In most cases, the customer who contacts the support group has a problem and needs immediate help. To ensure fast response, the representative needs a single, easy-to-navigate interface that consolidates relevant information and facilitates easy access. Any delays perceived by the customer directly reflects on the company as a whole and can result in customer dissatisfaction or, even worse, customer alienation.

Customer service representatives need instant access to up-to-date product, company and customer information. Field service and help desk personnel need access to customer problem and service history information for problem solving. This information must be accurate and content-rich, and it must be accessible and at their fingertips while they are interacting with customers. Customer service and support personnel also need to enter data into a variety of databases and knowledgebases, such as order information, problem tracking , escalation and resolution and technical support.

In many cases, customers ask routine questions that do not require personal interaction. These include questions on pricing, product specifications and routine operational questions. Some companies have attempted to provide answers through fax-back and voice-response systems. However, these systems are often lacking in detail, and information is difficult to locate. As a result, these systems are not suitable for delivering timely information, and do not reduce call volume appreciably.

Some organizations use traditional client-server applications which give customer service representatives access to multiple databases. However, each application typically operates independently of the others and is not easily modified. Representatives may have to log in and out of several databases to gather the information they need. Customers become impatient when they have to wait on hold while the customer service representative searches for information. Moreover, client-server systems can be very expensive to operate, maintain and update.

The Intranet Solution

Intranets can enable organizations to create information systems that consolidate data from multiple databases or information systems within a single customer transaction. A Web-based application can be developed that enables representatives to use a single query to access multiple databases simultaneously. The application consolidates information in a single, easy-to-navigate window. For example, the application could enable fast access to both a customer database and a knowledgebase of known problems and solutions.

A knowledgebase is well suited for the hyperlinked search and retrieval capabilities associated with Web-based technology. Customer service personnel can easily navigate a large archive of data, which is constantly updated, to find the desired information. Faster access to this data dramatically reduces the time required to complete a customer transaction, so each representative can handle a higher volume of service calls. As a result, many companies find that they can handle a growing customer base without expanding the size of the service and support staff.

The company can also allow direct, yet controlled and secure, access to corporate information by customers, dealers and distributors. These external users enjoy ready access to the information they need without the intervention of service or support staff. This helps reduce the number of incoming calls that require human intervention, so service and support staff can spend more time solving complex problems.

Customer Service & Support Applications

Finance & Accounting

Challenges facing the finance and accounting department include:

• Collecting, consolidating and processing financial data from multiple sources.
• Making consolidated financial data available to those who need it in a timely, yet secure manner.

Financial data is difficult to gather, update and consolidate because it is stored in multiple databases that are typically spread across multiple functional groups on different computing platforms. The finance and accounting staff must collect sales order information, manufacturing cost and inventory information, development costs and payroll and budget information from other departments. They must also process transactions such as expense reports, timecards and purchase orders. To complicate matters, much of the information used by finance and accounting is paper-based.

The Intranet Solution

An Intranet provides a secure, central point for collecting and publishing financial information. It also provides a vehicle for online transaction processing, ensuring rapid updating of information and availability of accurate and timely information. As a result, an Intranet enables managers across the company to track financial performance and maintain effective control. Intranets also permit external business partners, shareholders and analysts to have limited access to financial data to build tighter relationships with these constituencies and provide them with timely, accurate information.

Finance and Accounting Applications

Manufacturing & Operations

The manufacturing department faces a number of critical issues, including:

• Coordinating, maintaining and publishing production schedules.
• Managing parts and resource supply chain.
• Maintaining effective inventory control (including receiving, warehousing and shipping of raw materials and finished goods).
• Ensuring quality.
• Reducing costs.

Production scheduling and inventory control are dynamic and involve the integration of information from internal and external sources--supplier information, sales forecasts, allocation requirements, engineering information (including changes and updates), warehouse location tracking and cycling of perishables.

The quality assurance (QA) staff needs to maintain an up-to-date database with diverse information that includes customer service input, data on troubleshooting and returns, and feedback from engineers, manufacturing personnel and inspectors. This enables QA to maintain accurate quality statistics and pass this information on to management.

Cost reduction requires close collaboration among suppliers, manufacturing operations, customer service, field engineering, engineering and purchasing.

The Intranet Solution

With an Intranet, manufacturing departments can consolidate data from multiple sources to simplify and speed access. An Intranet provides centralized publishing of manufacturing and QA data. The company can extend its Intranet into an Extranet that includes customers and suppliers, and enables their customers to place orders directly and to receive orders electronically. Extranets also facilitate supply chain optimizations, along with just-in-time and other inventory control measures that reduce inventories and slash costs.

An Intranet fosters collaboration between manufacturing and other functional groups within the enterprise. This helps in identifying product problems, incorporating design changes, enhancing productivity and improving inventory control. The result is reduced costs and higher margins.

Manufacturing & Operations Applications

Intranets, the next major step in the evolution of information systems, are changing the face of business. They help empower employees in an enterprise to better perform their tasks by solving their day-to-day business problems through enhanced communications and collaboration, and accelerated information dissemination and access. The result ä tighter relationships with customers, employees and business partners, which translate into increased revenues and profits. Because Intranets leverage the existing information system infrastructure, they deliver these benefits in a cost-effective manner.