Internet Labor Resource Planning Gains Acceptance

Previously, each manager would manually track employee work hours and provide them to the appropriate executive on a weekly basis. This resulted in volumes of paperwork and was also time-consuming, labor-intensive and lacking in accuracy and consistency. The company was looking for a way to overcome these obstacles.

Every business can benefit from increased productivity and employee efficiency, but how can the Internet help busy HR professionals like those at Service Zone do their bit to achieve this? Easy. Invest in online Labor Resource Planning (LRP) tools and manage your employees' skills and time easily and more effectively.

"One of the critical factors limiting the growth of organizations… is the availability of talent. Knowledge workers fuel today's economy and this type of talent is in short supply," said Marcia Jones, senior VP and COO of Criterion Inc., a provider of enterprise-wide people planning solutions.

"Consequently, companies and public institutions find they must plan the acquisition, optimization and development of this precious resource."

Traditionally called time and attendance solutions, LRP aims to integrate different components like time keeping, project management, desktop planning, scheduling and demand forecast, which are usually handled separately. Using the Internet as an interface allows companies like eLabor.com to offer their clients a complete suite of integrated tools in this field.

"I would define LRP as the ability for an organization to capture an accurate picture of each employee's skill level so that they can create a skill-gap analysis and provide training that will have the greatest impact and return on the job," said Molly Pence, training and development specialist at Made2Manage, a business management solutions provider.

Made2Manage has recently invested in Ingenium's online LRP tool, Click2Learn, in order to inventory employee skills, generate a skill-gap analysis and log training classes and participation in those classes.

This is exactly what Service Zone was looking for as well, so its HR department searched the Internet for the ideal solution. They settled on Vitrix Inc., a Tempe, Ariz. firm that specializes in time and labor management solutions. Four main factors attracted Service Zone to Vitrix: data capture and reporting capabilities, the Web interface, the PC clock and the payroll interface.

With Vitrix, Service Zone automated the process of developing their billable hours versus non-billable hours ratio on a real-time basis, using HourTrack 2000, which allowed them to track the total and provide reports at any time. "A mere 1 percent increase in billable utilization of manpower over time means millions of dollars in savings. VITRIX has provided a valuable solution for us," said John Bray, Service Zone's executive VP.

Service Zone managers can now review hours, check schedules, view accrued benefits and decipher attendance instantly from a real-time PC status-board on their desktops. "Not only did we save in labor, but all employees got the added features and benefits the very next day," said Bray.

Online LRP tools can help HR professionals track employee hours on specific jobs, off-load daily requests for data from employees, visually organize staffing needs by day, week or month to ensure proper coverage, minimize overstaffing and understaffing, while controlling overtime costs and enforce payroll policies such as overtime, attendance and rounding rules, schedule enforcement and lunch and break policies, according to Nanette Howard Vitrix VP of Marketing. It can also assist with tracking employee attendance and tardiness.

Icarian, a company that automates and integrates the entire workforce lifecycle, believes that the online component of workforce management, as it calls LRP, should revolve around analysis. "We define the online planning phase as using analytics to see past-performance coupled with industry conditions and accurately predict the need and manage expectations to management," said CEO Doug Merritt, who founded the company in 1997, drawing together top executives from PeopleSoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and BroadVision.

And, according to Jones, LRP is not just an HR activity. Managers, HR professionals and employees must all collaborate to create an effective workforce. "Technology certainly makes this easier and more efficient. Thanks to the Web and e-mail, everyone can participate at their convenience at the office, at home or on the road," Jones said. "So, today's technology makes 'online' LRP easier to implement across an enterprise."

Managers and employees not involved in HR can check their vacation and sick time as well as schedules and messages from managers. They can keep track of their benefits and their hours and assist HR with certain functions. Vitrix's eWebClock, for example, allows remote clocking in and out of employees.

For HR professionals the benefits are clear. "Organizations … can spend training dollars where the impact will be the greatest. These tools also log all training [and] provide a skill-gap analysis for each employee to be used during performance reviews," said Pence. "When we know what skills our employees have and what skills they need further training on, then we are better prepared to spend training dollars where we know the impact will be the greatest!"

Online LRP tools allow HR executives to assess and analyse their employees' skills in real-time and design and implement training programs to compensate for identified skills gaps. The real-time nature of the system means that HR (departments) will be able to customise their programs to suit the up-to-the-minute needs of the company. "[Online LRP translates into] efficiency and accountability," Merritt said. "It puts a science to a formerly manual process."

There are challenges, of course. "So far our biggest challenge has been getting all of the employees to inventory their skills and convert job descriptions to skills so that we can do a skill-gap analysis," Pence said. "There are quite a few hours of data entry and collection that goes into the beginning stages of using the LRP tools."

Yet despite these minor challenges, online LRP is set to grow. "We believe that because of the convenience afforded managers, employees and HR professionals, all these constituencies will demand more functionality through the browser," said Jones. "When managers can use their Web browser to find out more information about their competitors than they can about their own workforce, they will be more vocal in acquiring appropriate workforce planning solutions."