Managing Workforce Change With Personnel Action Notices (pan) and Bpm

If you're an HR manager or administrator in an organization with more than a few hundred employees, you know the challenges associated with managing change in your workforce.  If your organization is risk-sensitive, such as in a regulated industry, or if your organization has influencing factors such as high turnover, then the problem is compounded by more complex business rules and processes.  How do you manage workforce change effectively, consistently, without bias and exception?  How do you automate HR business processes, eliminate paper, and ensure that policies are fully implemented? 

Fortunately there's a technology that has been successfully applied in business operations for several years now that provides the answer: Business Process Management, or BPM.  Having grown out of and matured from what was previously called workflow technology, BPM is a platform for consistent application of business rules, business process, and business policy.  The fact that BPM is delivered as a platform is a problem, as this contributes to BPM's inability to be a cost effective solution in human capital management.  While you might choose any one of dozens of BPM platforms upon which to automate your workforce change management, you are also embarking upon a development cycle to be conducted either by your IT team or your HRIS team.  The cost of the technology license is therefore just a component of your overall cost of ownership, often a small cost. 

But why is a general BPM platform an inappropriate path to workforce change management perfection?  Won't you have to customize any BPM platform to represent our unique business processes?  How then is it possible to have a personnel change management system that is better than off-the-shelf BPM?  The answer lies in the important nuance that all workforce management processes are conducted in the context of the employer-employee relationship, a very important detail that is not taken into consideration by a general BPM platform.  A BPM system is much like a completely blank sheet of paper: you could draw any picture you want, but it will take you a while and you're completely on your own.  However, if you start with line-ruled paper or graph paper, you at least have some guidelines on which you can draw a picture. 

PAN, an Emerald Software system that uses BPM to automate workforce change management, is an acronym for Personnel Action Notices.  PAN provides the key structure-those guidelines-for business processes to be implemented within the framework of the employer-employee relationship, drastically cutting the time needed to implement effective workforce change management while maintaining the agility and flexibility needed to represent your unique human resources policies, procedures, and rules.  Providing PAN with your organizational structure allows your business processes to take into consideration practically any imaginable relationship between employees when enforcing business processes.  Emerald Software calls this organizational structure the "compendium" and includes not only an electronic org chart for positions-filled or open-but also unlimited descriptive information for each employee to allow the most possible flexibility in defining your unique business processes.  For example, a common business policy might be that a manager may request a raise for one of their employees, but the manager's manager must approve the request.  Furthermore, if the raise request is greater than 5%, business policy might require the appropriate business unit's VP to approve the request.  Clearly, the ability to analyze the organization structure-a capability general BPM systems don't provide off-the-shelf-is necessary to implement these business policies. 

Astute HR technologists may wonder if a security model like Microsoft's Active Directory (AD), a staple means for BPM systems to recognize the people in the organization, could be employed to represent the org chart and provide the structural intelligence to solve this problem.  The answer is that while Active Directory can indeed be used to represent the organizational structure to your BPM platform (assuming that platform is Active Directory friendly), it probably doesn't make sense as the core HRMS system already represents the organization chart, and mirroring the structure into Active Directory not only demands more of AD than Microsoft intends it, but also creates duplicity because maintenance of the organizational chart now also straddles the IT department in addition to HR (not a situation most HR managers would enjoy).  But the most significant reason why AD doesn't make sense for representing organizational structure is that AD is inherently people-centric; HR managers know, of course, that an org chart is position-centric.  Open positions can't be represented in Active Directory, yet they might be important in the context of business rules and processes.  A method as employed in Emerald Software's PAN product makes more sense as it is position-centric and mirrors the HRMS system as the master data source, keeping the org chart completely in the HR department. 

What personnel actions are typical candidates for automation with a product like PAN?  One only needs to examine the employee status change form to create an inventory.  Probably the most common actions to automate are: terminations (also known as offboarding), address and contact changes, compensation changes, compensation corrections and back pay requests, disciplinary actions, commendations, lateral and location moves, promotions and demotions, multiunit allocation changes, and various other changes to employee master information (such as notifying the company that an employee has earned a new degree or certification).  While the ability to accommodate any number of actions is important, it is perhaps more important to evaluate how flexibly a workforce change management product implements unique business processes.  Does the system handle branching?  Looping?  Calls to other systems?  How are the changes made?  Emerald's PAN system is as flexible as programming, but the process changes are done by business people within Microsoft Visio, not by writing code. 

HRMS systems have come a long way in providing flexible workflow capabilities when it comes to employee change management, but beware of application workflow versus true business process management.  When considering implementing your change management process in your HRMS, evaluate not only whether the process is flexible enough (branching, looping, and other features needed to represent your particular process requirements), but also whether the process rests solely and completely within your HRMS system.  Many processes have tasks and participants that aren't users of the HRMS system; does your HRMS provide facility for such policy requirements?  HRMS application workflow generally provides valuable shortcuts for work completed within the HRMS system, but they stop at the front door of their own functionality and users.  If you have processes that assign work tasks that are not a function of your HRMS, such as turning off a terminated employee's network access, then you'll need to consider a system such as Emerald's PAN system to fully automate this business policy.  If you have processes that engage users outside of the HRMS system (they might not only be employees who are not users of the HRMS system, they might also be people who aren't employees at all, such as outsourced benefits administrators, contractors, etc.) then you'll need to consider a system such as Emerald Software's PAN system. 

In addition to automating your workforce change management procedures and perfecting your HR policy and rules, there are a number of other advantages to automating your personnel change management.  Many corporations, driven either by internal initiative or by business partners, are adopting Green Initiatives, of which implementing paperless processes is a top objective.  A truly paperless HR environment can be implemented with a tool like Emerald Software's PAN product.  Another advantage is hyper-efficiency; completely automated processes, holding process participants accountable for their roles and tasks, allowing your organization to do increasingly more work with fewer resources.