First National Bank (FNB) and Pretoria-based IT group Solit SA have formed a strategic partnership to provide Web-based employee self-service applications, enabling staff to update and administer their own personal data via the corporate intranet.
The partnership has seen FNB become one of the world's leading users of employee self-service applications, allowing more than 6 000 staff members to manage their personal interactions with the organisation across the intranet.
The result has been decentralisation of the overall HR function, significant cost-cutting and empowerment of employees to administer and update their own personal data.
FNB implemented Employee Self-Service intranet (ESSi), from Solit Interactive, on top of its payroll system. FNB says it is now among the top 5% of employee self-service intranet implementations in the world. Ultimately the bank plans to roll it out to its entire workforce, which would result in well over 20 000 people coming online.
Solit's ESSi solution resides on top of the UniQue payroll system, which was supplied by Q Data DynamiQue (QDD), Solit Interactive's solution partner. Employee self-service is one of the fastest growing technology trends in the market today, and is viewed as a killer application of e-business. This is because, from a central console or from their own PCs, employees can initiate an increasing number of interactions with the company. This relieves the burden of data capture on the company, increases accuracy, reduces data redundancy and removes non-value-add functions from HR.
"Previously, if an employee wanted to apply for leave or change personal details on the company records, any number of paper forms would have to be filled out and shuffled back and forth," says Edgar Blomeyer, CEO of FNB People Link. "Now the staff member simply logs on to the intranet through the normal Web interface, makes the changes online, and receives automatic notification of receipt."
FNB estimates it will cut up to 21% of its total personnel administration costs in this manner, not to mention the time savings implicit in removing paper from day-to-day interactions.
"Even leave applications are simplified," says Blomeyer. "A person applying for leave will submit the request on the intranet and it will automatically be loaded into the e-mail inbox of their section head for approval. Once approved, the employee is automatically notified by return e-mail." The only transactions subject to managerial approval are financial applications. "I went overseas to study a number of implementations before we launched ours," says Blomeyer.
"We are unique in SA in how far we have taken the project," he adds. "FNB is one of the few organisations in the world which also enables financial transactions to take place over the intranet, subject to managerial approval."
The potential also exists for FNB to take this service as a payroll bureau out to the market, Blomeyer says. "FNB runs payroll for a number of companies, and we can offer this as a value-add or as a new service to attract further clients," he says, adding that the reason that many companies do not outsource their payroll functions is that they lack sufficient input into the system. ESSi has transformed this situation.
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