Reference no: EM132798021
CASE STUDY:
New Systems Help Plan International Manage Its Human Resources
Founded in 1937, Plan International is one of the oldest and largest children's development organizations in the world, promoting rights and opportunities for children in need. With global headquarters in Surrey, UK, the organization has operations in more than 70 countries (including 51 developing nations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas), and worked with 81.5 million children in more than 86,676 communities in 2014. Plan International has grown steadily over the years and has more than 1,200 paid staff members and more than 9,000 volunteers. Plan International is not affiliated with any religious or political group or government. It obtains about half of its funding from donations from corporations, governments, and trusts and the rest from individuals willing to sponsor a child. Plan International works with children, families, communities, and local governments to bring about positive change for children in health, education, water and sanitation, protection, economic security, and coping with catastrophes such as wars, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. For example, Plan has sent workers to help children affected by the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa. In addition to coordinating emergency response efforts, Plan runs public health information campaigns and trains health and aid workers. Plan's objective is to reach as many disadvantaged children as possible, and this requires a highly coordinated approach. When an emergency strikes, Plan must locate and deploy the most appropriate resources wherever they are required. To accomplish this a disaster relief team at Plan's head office must sift through data on all of its 10,000 aid workers in 70 countries to see which people have the appropriate skills and experience in medical aid, child protection, education, and shelter management to provide the necessary services. Typically, the people chosen to respond to a specific emergency will have a variety of skills, including frontline workers with knowledge of the language and the local area. Plan now has the ability see data about all of its workers' skills the moment an emergency occurs, so it can respond immediately with the right team of people. Plan is now able to instantly assemble pertinent information about its workers because of its new human resources (HR) systems. The human resources systems allow Plan to track not only the skills people bring when they are hired but also any additional training or experience they have acquired for disaster response emergencies while working for Plan. The human resources systems also help Plan manage the grants and donations it receives. When a donation first comes in, it is sent to Plan's London headquarters and allocated from there. If, for example, Plan receives a $40 million grant to use in Sierra Leone, Plan will need different people to manage that grant for Plan. Plan needs to be able to scan the organization globally to find the right people. Before the new human resources systems were implemented, Plan was working with very outdated decentralized systems that were partially manual. The organization had to keep track of employees using a patchwork of 30 different human resources systems, spreadsheets, and documents. It could take weeks to locate people with the right language skills, disaster experience, and medical training. When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, Plan had to email everyone asking if staff knew any people who could speak French, had the appropriate disaster management skills, and were available to help. In 2012 Plan began looking for a human resources system that could handle its growing global workforce, support common processes across all regions, and deliver information on a secure mobile platform in regions where technology infrastructure was not well developed. The organization selected a cloudbased HR system from SAP's SuccessFactors as well as on-premises software from SAP, which satisfied these requirements and are integrated with one another. Implementation of the new system began in May 2013. It took only 16 weeks to implement a fully working system at Plan's international headquarters, and all of Plan's international regions were brought onto the system by 2014. The cloud-based SuccessFactors system runs in remote computer centers managed by SuccessFactors and is accessible to users via the Internet. The system provides a centralized employee profile with a comprehensive view of employee skill sets, expertise, experience, and career interests. Through an intuitive interface, employees can update their own information, creating an easily searchable INTERACTIVE SESSION: ORGANIZATIONS New Systems Help Plan International Manage Its Human Resources 80 Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise directory that every employee can access. Plan uses SuccessFactors software modules for recruiting, performance and goals, succession and development, compensation, and learning. Plan also implemented SuccessFactors Workforce Planning and on-premises SAP Personnel Administration and Organization Management software. Workforce planning entails systematic identification and analysis of what an organization is going to need in terms of the size, type, experience, knowledge, skills, and quality of its workforce to achieve its business objectives. SAP's Personnel Administration software manages employee recordkeeping and organizational data concerning the recruitment, selection, retention, development, and assessment of personnel. SAP's Organization Management software enables organizations to depict and analyze their organizational and reporting structures. The new human resources systems provide a bird's-eye view of the entire Plan workforce, showing immediately how many people work for Plan, where they are located, what skills they possess, their job responsibilities, and their career paths. Plan's central human resources staff spend much less time chasing information. For example, assembling and analyzing data from employee performance reviews, including 4. How did these systems improve operational efficiency? 5. How did these systems improve decision making? Give examples of two decisions improved by Plan's new systems. performance-based salary calculations, used to take up to six months. Now all it takes is the push of a button. Employees are able to access their human resources records online and update information such as address, family details, and emergency contacts. By enabling employees to perform these tasks themselves, Plan saves valuable human resources staff time, which can be directed toward more value-adding work. Plan is also able to show its donors exactly how their contributions were spent and the results. Using SuccessFactors and SAP human resources software, Plan staff are able to identify and dispatch relief workers to disaster areas within hours. When Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in November 2013, Plan specialists were on the scene within 72 hours. Being able to deploy staff to emergencies so rapidly has saved more lives. What's more, Plan's improved response time has helped it secure new sources of funding by giving it more credibility with governments, corporations, and other sources of grants and donations.
Source: Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm (15th Edition, 2017, pp 80-81)
CASE QUESTIONS
1. Describe the problem faced by Plan International. What management, organization, and technology factors contributed to this problem?
2. Describe the system solution to this problem. Describe the types of systems used for the solution.
3. Why is human resources so important at Plan International?
4. How did these systems improve operational efficiency?
5. How did these systems improve decision making? Give examples of two decisions improved by Plan's new systems.