Southampton City College

Southampton City College opts for OrgPlus to communicate staff wide directory on Intranet with data direct from HRMS.

Southampton City College vision is the promotion of learning, by providing high quality education and training. Employing 650 people across its campus, the college has set very high standards for success for all of the students. It is particularly proud of the success with students of all ages who have not been successful at achieving qualifications before. The college provides education and training to school leavers, adult learners, international students and the business community.

The Challenge
The HR Director wanted a simple and more efficient way of developing organisational charts of the college in order to help visualise the workforce, define and communicate departments structures and highlight spans of control. The team were looking to communicate the college’s structure through charts on the Intranet and wanted to develop a college wide directory, with details such name, position, department together with contact details such as telephone number and email addresses.

The college needed a solution that would automatically create and maintain chart organisational structure and the workforce directory. Previously charting at the college was done through a manual, labour intensive process using tools such Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, often meaning that they would become out of date almost as soon as they were completed.

The HR data for Southampton City College is held on Select Insight HRMS, and a solution was sort that could integrate easily and cost effectively with its management system.

The Solution
OrgPlus came highly recommended and after a short period of evaluation, a decision was quickly made to purchase the software. OrgPlus provides all the technology the college were looking for in a solution – flexible functionality, integration with HR management system, visualisation of data, and easy-to-use charting tool.

The HR management system, Select Insight, integrated with OrgPlus to produce professional organisational charts for display on the college Intranet, showing the most up-to-date and accurate information available on staff.

On-site training was provided to the in-house ICT team, Payroll and HR team. As an educational establishment, the college appreciate that good training would help them get the best out of the new software and ensure’s they achieved a return on investment.

Tailored to the college specific requirements, the training highlighted the functionality they needed to help them achieve their original business objectives. The training emphasized what a powerful HR tool OrgPlus is, and demonstrated the scope of the software to provide additional information on HR metrics and workforce modelling.

The Results
The new software has been received well and OrgPlus Power Users now have the ability to easily download the charts into Microsoft Office documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF to create presentations, reports and for publication on the college’s Intranet. Tangible returns have been achieved through significant savings in preparation time of organisational charts and workforce directory through automatically linking to the HR management system.

Through the visualisation of workforce data, Southampton City College has experienced considerable improvements in communications, with the knock on effect, that once data was published, staff immediately feedback on any inaccuracy. The HR management system is now a much truer reflection and more accurate source of workforce information.

The college was struck by how the simply visualisation has enabled managers and alike to be able to understand and interpret workforce data in a more effective and efficient manner, speeding up the process considerably.

The Future
The training has opened the colleges eyes to the possibilities on how OrgPlus can assist the HR team in managing the workforce going forward. They are all working together to expand the current feed of data from the HR management system to utilise OrgPlus to its full potential as an HR tool.

With the uncertain economic future of our global economies, the ever changing skills requirements of the business community and the focus on talent management, Southampton City College HR team feels in a strong position to deal speedily and effectively with what ever the future holds.

“The simple ability to visualise work force data in organisational charts through OrgPlus and communicate that information through Intranet and staff wide directory has had a very positive effect for Southampton City College.” He went on to say “The accuracy of the data held in HRMS has improved, which is vital when we are using this as the bases of workforce planning and critical decision making.”

Colin Willott, ICT Technician at Southampton City College