ScottishPower
	"We need an electronic filing system to manage HR documents for 9000 employees"

“ScottishPower implemented a SharePoint solution from CES that provided HR an e-filing system to host the personal files of the 9,000 employees, along with search capabilities, workflow for contracts, an interface with the HR Payroll system and an interface to accept scanned input.  The work was more complicated by the requirement to host the system on the parent company’s, (Iberdrola), servers in Bilbao, Spain. CES proved excellent in forming good working relationships with the HR business on their requirements and with the IT people in Spain on the test and build of the system.  Difficulties in different working times and communication with Spain had to be overcome and CES showed a strong commitment to delivering in this environment. The development of the solution was also complicated by several changes to requirements from the Business and from Iberdrola IT.  This resulted in changes to scope, timescales and costs and CES managed these well, keeping to tight timescales and adopting a fair approach to any changes in cost. Overall the flexibility and commitment from CES was key in delivering this project successfully in what was a complex situation.” – Duncan McDonald, Project Manager, ScottishPower.

The client:

ScottishPower are an energy company supplying gas and electricity to homes and business around the United Kingdom and also generating power for supply to the grid.  ScottishPower are a subsidiary of the Spanish utility company Iberdrola.

The challenge:

ScottishPower requested an e-filing solution for their HR department to replace the current network file sharing and paper filing used for their 9,000 current employees.  This solution was to provide an enterprise content management solution for storing and managing HR documents.

There were a number of key reasons for looking at an alternative solution to the current HR system:

• HR Staff spend time:
• physically storing and locating and retrieving files
• tracking and reviewing milestones
• Documentation:
• Requires an ever expanding space requirement
• Requires access by HR staff at multiple locations
• Requires access by more than one person at a time. If one person has the file no one else can access it
• Can only easily retrieve by specified/single record
• Must comply with company and legal records management policies and procedures

All HR information is stored within an Oracle database.  This information was to be used to structure the employee files within the new electronic HR filing system and provided any relevant required metadata

The technology: 

The chosen technology was Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007).  It is a web application platform which makes it easier for people to work together.  SharePoint encourages collaboration on documents and projects and provides the following features:

• Document Libraries with versioning and check-in and check-out facilities
• Content types – allows for consistent document templates to be used in the system with prepopulated metadata from within the SharePoint system.
• Content and document approval
• Out of the box workflows
• Item level security – this ensures that users only see what they are meant to see

Full text indexing (with the addition of a PDF iFilter PDFs are also searchable)

The solution:

CES developed a solution based on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform.  The solution is based around two main document libraries (current employees and leavers); there is a folder for each employee which contains the employee documents and employee metadata.  Each night, the SharePoint data is updated from an external Oracle database which ScottishPower use to manage employee information. 

The site makes good use of SharePoint content types and these are used to manage all of the HR team’s standard document templates.  The HR team are able to create standard documents such as letters and contracts and SharePoint automatically completes any employee information such as name, employee number or address.

The solution also provides complex workflow functionality to manage things like document approval, reminders and records management. 

The system contains a new scanning solution which is configured to scan documents directly into SharePoint.  Scanning software is used to scan the documents and the HR team select the employee reference number against which the document should be filed.  SharePoint then automatically stores the documents in the correct employee folder.

A similar principal is applied with mail merges.  The HR team create the mail merge document and then use data from the Oracle system.  The resulting multi-page file is then split by SharePoint into multiple files, each of which is stored into the relevant individual employee folder. 

The HR team now have an online area for employee files that can be accessed from multiple locations.  Physical documents can be scanned directly to the e-Filing system reducing the storage need for paper files and the automatic filing of these scanned documents reduces the time taken for processing paperwork.  Consistent templates can be used across the department, with the ability to look up information directly from the HR system means this process is much faster and simpler than it was previously.  In addition the workflow and document approval with automatically generated email alerts means that each process can be tracked through defined stages and reviewed on a regular basis by the appropriate members of the team.  Multiple team members can view the same employee file at the same time and finding the file through the search facility only takes a few seconds.