East Renfrewshire Council

East Renfrewshire, one of 32 councils in Scotland, provides services to a population of nearly 90,000 people living in the area. The main aim of the authority is to improve and maintain an attractive, safe local environment, where everyone has the opportunity to benefit from an enhanced quality of life. One of the smaller councils in the UK, East Renfrewshire achieved notable success when in 2007 it was voted the second best place in the UK to bring up a family.

A forward thinking council, in January 2008 East Refrewshire became the first Scottish local authority to create a Facebook page to publicise its services. The authority focuses on what is best for its citizens by making its services as joined up, simple and straightforward to access as possible. This ethos is carried throughout the organisation, and applies equally to internal systems used by staff.

Visualising the Workforce Structure

The council has 4,500 contracted employees across five different departments; Chief Executive's, Community Health and Care Partnership, Education, Environment and Finance. With a complex, hierarchical structure it was difficult to visualise the workforce, and it routinely took two days per quarter for each of the departments to produce organisational charts using Powerpoint. These were of course out of date almost before they were published. OrgPlus Enterprise is now used by all employees at the council. Published org charts are accessible to all staff via the intranet, giving basic information such as name, job title, reporting line and work location. The publication of the data in this format has helped the HR department to cleanse the information held in Resource Link as people noticed errors, such as incorrect reporting lines, or work locations.

As the sole person administering HR systems at the Council it was important for Karen that any system was easy and straightforward to use. Org charts are populated daily with data exported from Resource Link using a routine which Karen has been able to set up herself using Business Objects.

Supporting Workforce Management decisions

Senior management have restricted access to HR data via OrgPlus Enterprise and can view additional information like headcount, contract hours, full time equivalents, KPIs, and salary details for budgeting. OrgPlus Enterprise provides an enlightening view of the organisation to the senior managers, enabling them to see exactly what is happening within their areas, something that would be very difficult to do using traditional reporting methods, particularly in light of the council's many management levels and complex reporting structure.

Karen Farrelly comments, "Using OrgPlus Enterprise has enabled the Chief Executive, the senior management and the HR department to get a much more strategic view of the authority. The managers can better understand their resources which is critical in the current financial climate when looking to streamline services."

Return on investment

As well as providing everyone in the council with instant access to up to date charts, something that they have never had before, OrgPlus Enterprise also saves time in the preparation of the charts. The resources saved by using OrgPlus Enterprise are equivalent to one month of work per year.

Looking to the future, the IT department is currently working on a new telephone directory system for the council which will include a link to OrgPlus Enterprise so that staff can see basic details about the person that they are calling.

Karen Farrelly summed up, "OrgPlus Enterprise has provided East Renfrewshire with a great way to visualise our HR data. Every staff member benefits from the new system and it has enabled us to save time across all departments, however, the real value provided by the system is in providing dynamic, visual information to our senior managers. They are now able to monitor their departments much more closely, and are able to make workforce management decisions to streamline services with all the supporting facts available to them."