For ParkwayHealth, an outdated HRMS system has been unable to support the speed of the healthcare group’s rapid business expansion and growth in headcount. But Ann Yong, group senior vice president of people resource, has plans to change all that. By Lisa Cheong
Ann Yong is a busy woman. When we met in her Somerset office one November afternoon, she tells me that she just ended a meeting with HRMS project management consultants earlier in the day. And even as we talk, the conversation is softly punctuated by the soft pings of her email alerts going off in the background.
It is no wonder why Yong, who is group senior vice president of people resource at Parkway Group Healthcare, has a full plate on her hands. After all, she is at the helm of her company’s entire human resources management system revamp, an overwhelming task for any company with an HRMS system that is more than a decade old. ParkwayHealth comprises 70% of the business of its holding company, Parkway Holdings.
As of this moment, Yong oversees a workforce of 3,600 people spread across Singapore and more in China. In Singapore alone, she oversees three hospitals: East Shore Hospital, Gleneagles Hospital and Mount Elizabeth Hospital. The Singapore operations includes specialist clinics and laboratories as well.
Unlike other corporate entities, Yong faces the challenge of having to manage a diverse (and I really do mean diverse) group of employees. Yong’s employees all work drastically different working hours. Due to the nature of the business, some people who work 24-hour days, while others work on 12-hour shifts. Certain subsets of employees have to work on weekends while others work regular corporate 9-to-6 hours.
According to Yong, her 3,600-strong workforce can be broken down into three broad categories. The first group is comprised of nurses, numbering 1,200. And because the supply of nurses in Singapore is not enough to meet the industry’s demand, Yong says the organisation often has to supplement the organisation’s recruitment needs with nurses from neighbouring countries such as Philippines.
The second group of workers are what Yong calls “allied health” partners. At a staff count of 1,200, employees under this category include those working in the laboratories and rehabilitation centres and other functions such as radiologists and pharmacists.
The third category of employees are the corporate and support function, such as HR, finance, marketing, administration and IT, many of whom are Singaporeans.
And there are plans for further expansion in the coming years as well as the company readies itself with the launch of another 314-bed hospital in Novena in 2012. The company also plans to expand its regional footprint and its presence in neighbouring countries. With 500 people working in its China clinics, the company also operates in Brunei, India and Malaysia.
Taking business needs into account, Yong says there is a pressing need to overhaul the company’s system or it would in the future create even more inefficiencies for Yong’s HR team, who are already bogged down with administrative work. This was the push that led to Parkway Holdings inking a deal with Oracle’s PeopleSoft Human Resources system early in January this year that will see a new HRMS being implemented throughout its Singapore operations including ParkwayHealth and the group’s other entities.
Fixing it up
Before revamping the HRMS system, what were the inefficient HRMS processes which ParkwayHealth was grappling with?
One example of such inefficiency is when the department has to track the employees’ work schedules in order to calculate their pay.
Because of the large variety in work hours and schedules, Yong says the current system is only able to provide the snapshot of hours the employee has clocked in. But the system is unable to determine whether an employee is working his or her regular hours or is performing overtime work and should be compensated accordingly.
As such, tracking employees’ working hours has evolved into what Yong describes as a “semi-automated process”. After HR captures the information on employees’ working hours, a timesheet is then sent to the heads of each prospective department, who would then verify if they are working on their regular shift hours or on overtime.
After receiving the time sheets from the respective department heads, Yong has a team of nine payroll staff who would then have to manually activiate or unlock the system before they can calculate employees’ wages for the month. “The system can do some calculations, but we have to activate the system manually.”
Not only is there is a risk of human error during this process, but it is also a time-consuming process which requires timesheets to be submitted often as early as 10 days prior to pay day. It also means devoting dedicated resources to routine and administrative tasks, with nine out of her 36-strong HR team tasked to work on payroll alone.
“So it is quite a fair bit [of people] in payroll, [because] we have so many entities and different pay structures.”
The lack of a centralised database is also another major issue for Yong, as the various processes all have a different systems in which the data is stored. “So performance review is one system. Payroll is on another system,” she says.
“I can’t even use our current system to keep track of employees performance and competency rating,” she adds. With more than ten types of appraisals to suit the various job scopes in the hospitals, each employee appraisal is done on paper and is stored in various places – usually the manager keeps a digital copy and a paper copy submitted to HR. This results in a hefty amount of administration work and filing for the HR department.
And even leave applications are submitted on paper as well, says Ann. In addition, the lack of an Employee Self-Service function means employees who want to enquire about something as simple as their leave status requires a call to the HR department.
With the new HRMS, Yong hopes a centralised database would help integrate employees’ records and do a more organised job of maintaining employees’ historical records, job-related data and progress reports on critical human resource functions. Yong hopes this will also help reduce the amount of paper usage in the organisation.
Another organisational benefit would be from better data security. Through this, Yong says she will have better control over the amount of data employees can view in the system.
But perhaps the biggest draw of a new HRMS system is that it will now free up the HR practitioners’ time for more strategic tasks.
As a result of the administrative work and manual data entry, Yong says that it will be difficult to keep her staff for long as they do not see filing and data entry as beneficial for their career. With a new HRMS in place, Yong says she will deploy her nine employees who would be able to perform strategic tasks and become better business partners.
“My staff would say ‘I’m not going to do all this filing and churning out of reports everyday. I want to come here and do HR work’. So when our [new] system goes live next year, our existing staff will focus on something that gives more value-add to the operations, and play the role of a real business partner.”
Picking a vendor
After understanding the processes that need to be changed, what were factors of consideration when it comes to selecting a vendor?
In Yong’s case, it is unlikely that she would be able to find a vendor with experience in the healthcare sector, she says.
With the exception of the hospitals which fall under the government purview, ParkwayHealth is the largest private hospital provider in this market. Furthermore, because the government hospitals have their own in-house software systems, this means it is unlikely an HRMS vendor would have worked with a healthcare providerthat has a similar headcount to ParkwayHealth in Singapore.
However, having identified the inefficient processes, Yong says she had certain pre-requisite modules for the new HRMS they are working on. Most importantly, the HRMS would have an effective database capable of supporting various HR modules such as workforce administration, performance management, global payroll, global absence and other employee self-service functions.
Going beyond the basics, Yong also looks forward to the additional modules on e-recruitment, competency management and talent management. She adds that the company is also considering whether it should pick up a module on international assignments management as well, due to its expansion in the region.
But the HRMS cannot operate in a silo. One point of contention for the new HRMS would be the ability to interface and intergrate with the finance department’s software as well. And while the company’s 500-strong China team does not require a sophisticated HRMS at the moment, Yong says one of the factors they took into consideration was the possibility of interfacing with its China operations in the future.
After analysing four HRMS vendors of various sizes and nine months of careful deliberation, Yong says she finally decided to go with PeopleSoft and inked the deal with them in January earlier this year.
But the need for a rehaul was not was without its doubters. Yong says there were some who were under the impression “it is only an HR system”. What could be possibly so complicated about it?
In this situation, Yong says HR has to interact with the other stakeholders to explain that without a transformation in the HRMS system, the company’s continuous growth in headcount would only mean more administrative work for HR - thus hindering the department’s ability to be a strategic partner. Furthermore, with functions such as Employee Self Service, this reduces employees’ dependence on HR for tasks such as leave enquiries.
Despite the naysayers, Yong says it wasn’t very difficult to quickly earn the support of management. As the organisation needs to obtain reliable information about the workforce (such as head count, wage costs or competency levels) to run the business, management was well aware that it would take HR one to two weeks to produce the information they wanted.
As such, Yong says, “I think management was convinced that we need to go to that extent [of changing the system], and they agreed that we had to move on.”
Preparations
The initial rollout for the basic HRMS modules is expected go live in mid-April 2010, and Yong’s biggest worry right now is whether the system would go live by the expected date.
One reason for this is because the healthcare sector has many of the job titles and skills are not easily transferable across other industries, unlike functions such as marketing, sales, administration and legal.
As such, Yong says she finds herself spending time in frequent meetings with the external project managers, ensuring that they understand the unique job titles and bands in the company as well as ironing out all the minor issues. “When it comes to nusing and pathology, these are unique [functions].”
Since signing on the dotted line in January, Yong says the company has taken the opportunity to revamp its HR processes to make things more streamlined and efficient. It also helps save on HRMS customisation costs, she adds.
One example of a streamlined process is the company’s exit interview process. Previously, after an employee tenders, exit interview forms will be sent to the employee’s manager to state the reasons why the employee left. The problem is amplified if the person reports to several managers, and the result is that HR will be saddled with conflicting managerial reports for the employees’ departure.
But since the revamp, Yong says the current exit process only requires the exiting employee to fill in a form stating their reasons for departure in an online form, which will be submitted to HR. This cuts out unnecessary paperwork and conflicting reports from managers on the reason why employees leave.
After April 2010, Yong says she expects to run the two HRMS systems alongside each other concurrently for two months while the teething issues are sorted out. Immediately after that, she says she will look into implementing the e-recruiting function for the company.
But if all goes according to schedule, Yong anticipates these changes would benefit not only her team, but will help support the business as it grows. “Healthcare is one area where lots can be done [in terms of HR processes], and we have to move on fast since we are going regional. And there is no other way better way to do so than to make full use of the technology,” Yong says.
