Success Story: St Helens College

St Helens College, located in Greater Merseyside between Manchester and Liverpool, is one of the largest providers of Further and Higher Education, and Training in the North West of England. It serves approximately 13,000 full and part-time students on programmes ranging from basic skills to post-graduate courses. The college is spread across 3 campuses and employs over 800 staff. The College's mission statement is 'it's all about you', which expresses the organisation's focus and commitment to customer service.

Business Challenge

Over the last 100 years, St Helens College has strived to provide the most up-to-date education and training through its 800 plus employees. Creating and managing organisational charts for the entire college had become a laborious process. Each department, across the 3 campuses manually created individual org charts and incorporated departmental and managerial changes. This manual solution created several problems:

• Employees used various software solutions to produce org charts and experienced difficulty creating detailed charts with workforce data.
• There was no consistent format, methodology or approach to producing charts.
• Charts often had incorrect or unclear workforce data. It was a challenge to keep track of all changes, with charts often reflecting teaching lines rather than the org structure.
• HR lacked the functionality to produce professional-looking, boardroom quality charts for executive staff, students, government and examining bodies.
• There was no overall org chart of employees for the entire college.

St Helens required a centralised and automated org charting solution to create an accurate visual representation of the college's structure, which would integrate directly with the organisation's NorthgateArinso HR management system, ResourceLink.

Business Solution

Based on strong recommendations, St Helens College selected OrgPlus to meet their requirements for org charting. The solution links directly into the company's NorthgateArinso HR management system, ResourceLink, automatically uploading workforce data changes daily. Today, users can easily published accurate org charts in PDF, PowerPoint or Excel formats within minutes.

After installing OrgPlus solution, St Helens has achieved the following results:

• The HR team can now quickly generate and distribute professional- looking org charts, making them more accessible and are now able meet the multiple internal requests for org charts from senior staff, government and student bodies.
• HR and senior staff can now visualise the entire organisation's hierarchy and better align the workforce to deliver better education and training to their students as demands change.
• With data coming straight out of the HRMS, the implementation of OrgPlus has helped with data validation, resolving inaccuracies held on the central database, such a reporting lines and reducing gaps in information. It has created greater autonomy across the organisation and reflects the reality of what is really happening.
• A tangible return on investment has been achieved through a saving in preparation time of manually created organisational charts - the departmental admin staff and HR team are delighted to be released from this laborious task enabling them to focus on more strategic business.
• OrgPlus has helped with delivering Establishment Control, clearly highlighting any grading or salary discrepancies across departments throughout the college org structure.

"Not only has OrgPlus provided a unified view of the workforce which can be easily communicated, we have also seen improvements in data accuracy. We have only just started using OrgPlus in earnest and are excited about using its full potential for measuring KPI's, budgeting, producing HR Metrics and delivering Establishment Control."

John Hays, Head of Human Resources
St Helens College