PaperTrail: Advancing Human Resources Admin

Historically the HR department within a company has often been overlooked in terms of streamlining processes via the introduction of new technologies, or solutions. HR software solutions are often in place, but they rarely focus on “easing the administrative pain” of gathering HR transactional data and capturing it within the HR software system. Many companies are still heavily reliant on hard copy forms and the hand-written method of populating these forms by prospective candidates, existing employees and management. This method is often littered with incorrectly captured data, illegible handwriting, missing documents, costly reprints, and a mountain of administrative work required to sift through the paperwork and transpose the form data into the HR system. Lead times for processing HR transactional data is often extended due to these issues, and sometimes causes the bloating of admin staff numbers, or places extreme pressure on smaller teams. All these points combine to create inefficiencies that increase the cost of managing HR transactions within a company.

The implemented HR systems sometimes offer electronic forms and the automation of processes that can be used to manage the key HR transactions, but these are often not flexible enough to cater for unique business requirements and they can also be prohibitively expensive to implement when concerning a large employee force. Retail companies are a prime example of companies with HR departments that have world class HR software systems in place, but that have found that these systems are not flexible enough to implement their custom HR forms and processes. Furthermore, exposing the electronic forms to the managerial network for approvals and exposing the forms to the prospective candidates and existing employees to capture their information can prove very costly. Enter PaperTrail.

PaperTrail, with its Workflow, eSignature, Electronic Forms and Employee Access Licensing modules, offers a flexible, cost-effective solution that integrates with and enables existing HR systems. Electronic versions of the existing HR forms are designed to integrate with the existing HR system and display key data via lookups to master data sources that are managed by the HR system. This introduces an accuracy in the information that employees and management teams work with when generating and populating the electronic versions of the forms via PaperTrail. Approval routes (report to lines) within the HR system can be referenced by PaperTrail to ensure that forms are distributed to the correct management resource(s) for approval. The best practice for each HR process is managed by an intelligently designed workflow which guides the electronic forms, and the users thereof, through the process. Notifications, escalations and exception handling are managed by the business logic that is built into the electronic forms and the workflows. Now that the HR processes have been digitalized, integration with ID verification and bank account verification services means that consenting candidates can have their identification and bank account details verified automatically via web services. This ensures that a candidate’s name and ID are correct before entering the HR system and reduces document handling tasks. The bank details verification service eradicates the possibility of salary payment issues due to incorrectly captured bank details, which is a frustrating reality of the manual capturing process. A further benefit of digitized HR forms within PaperTrail is the ability to integrate with the HR System to insert the form data into these systems. There’s now no need to transpose hard copy form data into the HR System, which introduces a substantial time saving and allows HR and Payroll admin staff to focus on their more important responsibilities.

In conclusion, migrating HR departments to an intelligent business process management and optimization application like PaperTrail has a proven return on investment. The decision to digitize the HR processes is a brave one, but it is a far easier one to make when partnered with PaperTrail’s features and HR environment experience.