Reference no: EM132958828

Dew Drops Inc. is an established local pharmaceutical company with an employee strength of 510 employees. The company's operations cover research, development, manufacturing and marketing of a range of products. These include medical devices, diagnostics, and generic pharmaceuticals. The company has also recently entered the nutrition market with its own brand of supplements.

For the past 3 years, the company had noticed that approximately 83% of their newly hired employees left within the first 2 years after joining the company. This was a loss of time, money, and effort as the company had to source for candidates to fill in the vacant positions. More importantly, the poor onboarding process also affected employee engagement, as many of the new hires did not align themselves with the goals of the organisation and lacked passion for their jobs.

From the focus group discussions, exit interviews and the employee satisfaction survey, it was found that poor onboarding experience due to the lack of a structured onboarding process was a major cause of the high attrition rate for newly hired employees. Many of the new hires also complained that they felt lost joining the company and did not know how to quickly find key information. "My colleagues are often too busy to answer my questions" was a common comment from new hires who then had to learn how to navigate their way in the company. Other new hires cited how some of their managers had not done all the necessary tasks to make their onboarding seamless. Hiring managers were also very unhappy over the amount of manual coordination and forms that that to be filled whenever they had a new hire.

Ramesh Rajah, the HR Director has been pushing for an increased allocation of the IT budget to Human Resources. He wanted to introduce a HR Information System to integrate the many different HR systems and revamp the whole onboarding process to make it smoother and more efficient. Under the current onboarding process, approvals had to be separately sought via email and managers had to liaise with the different departments for the whole onboarding process, e.g. requesting for a new laptop, a new workstation, orientation and meeting of key members of the senior management team. This led to delays with several managers missing out key steps in the onboarding process due to the large proportion of manual coordination involved.

With the integrated HRIS, Ramesh also hoped to reduce the multiple levels of approvals required in the current process. This was time consuming and not productive use of senior management's time. He envisioned a more efficient process where the hiring manager would be the only approver required for the onboarding on a new employee. HRIS would allow for approvals to be sought electronically instead of via emails. Also, the multiple HR platforms would be integrated into 1 so managers and employees could have a 1-stop location for HR processes and queries.

Unfortunately, in the last few years, the company had been allocating most of its IT budget to the sales and marketing division. This was used to create and launch new applications to track and improve the customer buying experience, as well as to track customer buying patterns. As a result, the Sales and Marketing division had over achieved their revenue targets and met all their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). All this led to the CEO allocating an even larger percentage of the IT budget to them, at the expense of the HR department. With their decreasing IT budget, the HR department was not able to implement IT tools, or software to improve current processes and failed to meet their KPIs for recruitment cost and attrition targets for employees under 2 years of service.

Things changed in 2020 with the appointment of a new CEO, Maxwell Lim. Maxwell was a firm believer that HR was a strategic partner in the business. He asked Ramesh to form a team to look at setting up a seamless onboarding experience with the installation of an integrated HR Information System (HRIS) which would allow for recruitment, performance management and payroll to all be housed on a common platform. The HRIS was also to be supported by a mobile application (app) which would allow for real time feedback and insights from new hires on the onboarding process. With the app, hiring managers could also submit their requests for their new hires anytime and from any location.

Maxwell gave his approval to proceed with the HRIS implementation at the end of March 2020 and allocated $80,000 for the project. The budget was based on a preliminary study by the HR team who had found that the average cost for installing an integrated HR system with an app ranged between $50,000 to $90,000 for large companies. Maxwell wanted the new HR system to go live by 1 January 2021. This was a tight time line as the process to select a suitable vendor could take 2-3 months, while data migration, verification of the data and system testing could take between 5-6 months. Ramesh knew that it was important that the system requirement, data migration and testing of the data quality be done properly to smoothly launch the HRIS. To further ensure the success of the project, he had the project team shortlist only vendors who were experienced and had a good track record in the industry.

Question:

Create the project plan for implementation of HRIS and the mobile app for the company. Evaluate the project status report