Have you ever lost out on a preferred candidate because your hiring process was so slow that a competitor made the offer, completed the hiring process and had the person on board before you could make an offer? Wonder how much that cost you?

Additionally, many organizations spend a substantial amount of their budget on personnel expenses that are due to regulatory requirements dictated by government regulations. These organizations are looking for ways to cut these costs, make their Human Resource processes more transparent and reduce the need for a paper system.

Business Process management (BPM) is the answer to all these needs. BPM can make these processes repeatable, sustainable and cost effective.

For example, let us take a look at an unnamed university’s hiring process for a non-student technician. The owner is the Director of Employment Services. The hiring process touches several areas such as the employing unit, employment services, personnel processing and records, the schools/colleges/divisions, payroll, and, of course, the candidate.

During this process, there are several forms from the university that must be filled out, and require an approval from the dean. Also federal and state employment verification forms must be completed; then the various paperwork is forwarded between the functional areas and entered into several, disparate systems. Perhaps there are criminal background checks or other clearances. Finally, a candidate is hired, an employee file is created and payroll is notified (we didn’t even get to the payroll forms).

This process is somewhat simplified for the purposes of this article. However, a BPMS will allow the university to create the position, maintain the employee’s records, maintain their forms, submit all approvals, forward the desired information to the various departments and update other disparate systems.

A less complicated example is a vacation request. With a full BPM Suite, here is the scenario: The employee initiates a leave request by entering her name, employee ID and the dates of the leave. The system then verifies the employee has accrued the needed leave and creates a task and/or emails the request to the supervisor. The Supervisor approves or denies the request and an email is sent to the employee and HR. When the employee returns from the leave the amount of the leave is deducted from the employee’s records. This automated process saves both the organization and the employee’s time and money.

Compliance with regulation and reduction of operating costs is the driving force behind the need to automate and improve processes. Federal regulations are specific, and if HR processes are done wrong can cause liability problems. The regulations in HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley are also major contributors to this compliance nightmare. In-house auditing work requiring ongoing verification and review have generated documentation and retention requirements that are very important for compliance.

Business Process Management can assist HR Departments to reduce resource requirements, save time and money by automating the processes involved in:

• Recruitment and Hiring
• Leave requests
• Training and certification
• Timesheets
• Benefits enrollment
• Performance reviews
• Salary/wage changes
• Policy changes

There are many HR processes that organizations can automate, from the hiring and termination processes, to the performance review process, as well as multi-page, complex processes instituted by government, academia and the business sector. As organizations strive to cut costs and manpower requirements, BPM can be a major part to this effort.

To learn about BPM or CAASPRE Consulting go to: www.caaspreconsulting.com