East Berkshire College extends HR system from GOWI

East Berkshire College has supplemented its extensive use of Professional Personnel, the HR solution from Gowi Total People Management, by implementing new modules to increase productivity and time savings. The recent additions, ëHR Infoí and ëPP Agentí, have helped the college to streamline its existing HR function, enabling the automation of key processes and encouraging self service HR practices.

East Berkshire College employs 450 full time permanent staff and a further 450 part time staff who teach the 11,000 students at the Further Education institution. Professional Personnel, a fully-featured and fully-integrated modular database system for HR management, was implemented in 2003. Since then two further modules have been incorporated over the last 12 months, the most recent of which, PP Agent, went live in November 2006.

The HR Info module is an intranet-based system that allows managers to access all pertinent staff information such as training history, qualifications, absences and salary entitlements. The system is fully interactive allowing staff at all levels to enter and update their files from central and remote working locations.

PP Agent, the most recent of the modules to be added, automates key administrative processes alerting managers to important dates, such as employee reviews and probation checks, and even training courses. The system also serves to inform managers of when their staff have reached absence allowance limits or other triggers, so action can be taken immediately and without reference to other information.

Sarah Prendergast, HR Information Officer at East Berkshire College, says, ìProfessional Personnel is an ideal HR solution for an institution such as ours. It is highly flexible and we are able to add new modules as we require them. HR Info and PP Agent have been excellent additions which have made our HR function more efficient and effective.

Prendergast continues, ìProfessional Personnel allows us to safely share all information between departments and create sophisticated reports in half the time as before. Our previous Access-based system had massive usability drawbacks that were hindering our functionality. With Professional Personnel we can create unique, bespoke screens and functions that are directly relevant and crucial to managing HR within education. We can create reports to measure the cost of labour turnover or create an automated function to ensure compliance with Government public sector HR legislation.

Prendergast concludes, ìThe implementation of the new modules was extremely easy to do and have integrated perfectly with the existing Gowi solution. Furthermore the customer support from Gowi has been exemplary; they have always been able to provide solutions if necessary and help us when designing our own functions and spreadsheetsî.