PEAR project streamlines payroll processby George Spain IS Technical Publisher At first glance, Human Resources' (HR) PEAR form revamp seems to be just another paper system gone electronic, one of dozens lately that have made the jump. On closer inspection, though, it reveals how classic analysis and emerging business practices led a complex project to a solid conclusion. The task was this: take the university’s paper form that circulates through HRM and Payroll like lifeblood and streamline it to cut weeks out of the process. The Position/Employee Action Request (PEAR) has a deceptively bureaucratic name for an extraordinarily complex activity. PEAR is used to submit, validate, process, and keep track of every employee action request initiated by a college or department. It is used for new hires, salary increases, transfers, department reassignment, promotions, changing funding allocations, etc. Last year, HR handled more than 18,000 action requests for the 4,600 university employees, according to Philippe Gresle, manager of HR IT/Operations and Records. But what made this project stand out is the way Gresle, HRM, and the UMS-GEAC Integration Special Interest Group and it’s chairperson Belle Dubis went about it. Technology, instead of driving the initiative, was the last consideration. Gresle and others considered the form itself, the flow, the final destination, and the business implications first. “We didn’t want to digitize the process without first considering the human quality of it,” Said Gresle. “It would do us no good to simply automate a system that needed its entire workflow to be redesigned.” Frank C. Clark, Ph.D., vice president of Information Technology and CIO, was impressed with the business-like approach. “This is doing IT the right way; technology was not the focus, but was used as the enabler. Rather than just automating the existing system, they put considerable thought and time into examining the workflow and process.” The team looked at how the form was generated in various departments and concluded that more human input, not less, was needed. They discovered that different departments had different methods for handling the form, but rarely was there a single person to contact in the department for follow-up. So upon their recommendation, Finance & Administration put in place the PEAR Officer Structure, where each entity relies on a designated individual (and of course, a backup officer to cover vacations, sick days, etc.) for the submission of all transactions. They redesigned ancillary forms and eliminated redundant, obsolete, and unnecessary information. By creating a logical human path for information flow, they managed to cut at least a week out of the process, insuring quicker raises, faster transfers, and updated funding allocations. “Quite often MUSC employees are paid out of multiple fund sources, some as many as 20 different funds, mostly from research grants. Each source had to be validated before we could take any action on pay,” Gresle said. That validation process included getting back to the person who initiated the form, which did not always clearly reflect approval responsibilities. Now only one person in each college or department is allowed to submit a form and that person sees it through to the end. The College of Medicine has 30 PEAR officers, but each is responsible for a single area—a far cry from the “anyone from anywhere” process previously allowed. “This is a pretty big administrative step that will positively impact the academic part of MUSC first, but eventually MUHA and UMA too,” said Maurice Snook, associate dean for Finance and Administration with the College of Medicine. “Everyone will ‘win’ with the outcome: faster processing, no more trips to obtain signatures...SmartStream and Hermit records will be much more current and all can monitor the progress of transactions as each step occurs.” Even more important to the PEAR revitalization was the business considerations. The project faces a complex meshing of systems and records like Hermit, UMS, and SmartStream. In order for the revamp to make any real impact, it had to work seamlessly with these and other computer systems, not create another one. “Business impact was the number one consideration. Once we determined a logical flow, strategic points of entry, and possible choke points, then we could begin to computerize the process,” said Gresle. A major landmark in this project will occur in the next couple of months when all UMS users will submit their transactions electronically to HRM. The project will finalize with the addition of the business rules routing engine, the HRM validation module and the GEAC universal interface. Friday, May 6, 2005
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