Human Resources: South Eastman Health standardizes Staff Scheduling processes

”Quadrant HR helped us identify a number of idiosyncrasies in our scheduling process. Now, we have a standardized process that is consistently applied throughout the organization that minimizes workload on the managers.”
- Teri Kindrat, Labour Relations Officer

ORGANIZATION
South Eastman Health provides health care and services to 55,000 people in the south-eastern region of Manitoba. Their mission is to ensure the best health for the people in the region through consultation, evidence-based decisions and innovation.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
“Prior to Quadrant HR™, scheduling was completely paper-based with multiple people involved in the process,” says Teri Kindrat, Labour Relations Officer.
Because so many people were involved, there were variations in process.

“We knew there were inconsistencies in collective agreement application but we really weren’t sure how much. We just knew we needed to address this.”

“Some employees were receiving pay and/or benefits that were in excess of their contractual rights and there were others that may not have received all they were entitled to because of individual interpretations of the collective agreement,” says Teri.

Standardizing the application of shift differentials is one example where opportunities for improvement existed.

“Depending on who was responsible for entering scheduling information, the application of shift differentials varied.”

South Eastman was also unable to easily quantify the total effort involved with the scheduling process.

“We didn’t have a good handle on how much time was spent preparing timesheets, doing scheduling, and entering timesheet data into Payroll because so many people were involved in the process,” says Teri.

Managers were also responsible for creating staff schedules and ensuring compliance with collective agreements which took them away from other priorities.

They also wanted to eliminate redundancies. “We did alot of data re-keying and entry into Payroll which took time away from other tasks and contributed to data integrity issues,” says Teri “we questioned the accuracy of information and lacked confidence in the data.”

QHR SOLUTION
In consultation with the Implementation team at QHR Software, the implementation process began with South Eastman identifying goals around a common theme: Obtain a global view of the information. This was achieved with a focus on improving efficiencies across the entire region through process automation, reducing manual, and clerical workload.

“We accomplished all these goals plus some additional ones that were a by-product. One example is the standardization and consistent application of collective agreements for union employees,” says Teri.

“We now feel confident that we are applying the collective agreements fairly and consistently which has helped educate employees about what they are entitled to.”

The entire scheduling process is now streamlined with less people involved.

“Before, 2-3 people from each site were involved with scheduling but now, for example, we have one scheduler who is responsible for scheduling 300 employees at 3 sites.”
With less people involved, data accuracy and integrity has improved significantly.

“In the past, some schedulers used the same earning codes for everything. But, with centralized scheduling, we have standardized the scheduling process and helped users understand the importance of using the appropriate earning codes,” says Teri. “Data integrity has improved because a select number of schedulers enter information rather than multiple people entering data on a timesheet.”

“We now feel confident that the scheduler is paying employees properly,” says Teri “and we have made quantum leaps in data confidence versus before.”

Managers now work with the scheduler rather than being responsible for creation and management of schedules. This has freed up their time to focus on other priorities. Soon, managers will be able to take advantage of the full Quadrant HR system.

“We are also planning to provide managers ‘read-only’ access to Quadrant HR to view schedules and have visibility to certain processes. Managers are excited about this so they can look up information on their own without having to call someone,” says Teri.

Another by-product of implementing Quadrant HR is the opportunity to improve other processes.

“You never really know how big of a project like this really is. We found the more system configuration we did, we constantly stumbled across things that we never thought of before. Until you are in implementation, you don’t know what it all entails. You must take the time to do all the configuration upfront because once you are ‘live’, it’s difficult to correct later,” says Teri, also Project Leader for the Staff Scheduling implementation.

In addition to process improvement, implementation helped users become intimately familiar with Quadrant HR.

“We wanted to ensure we had a well-rounded Project Team with a variety of experience and exposure to internal processes,” says Teri. “To help the team stay focused, we met in the boardroom for a day or two each week during the implementation process and completed our individual tasks together. These group meetings gave us the opportunity to discuss processes and problems that we addressed immediately giving us the opportunity to better learn from each other. This helped grow the skill-set within the team and improve the comprehension of Quadrant HR.”

“We wanted users to understand how the system worked rather than just how to manipulate it. This helped us to better configure the system to get the most benefit,” says Teri.
With the exception of home care workers, South Eastman is ‘live’ with Payroll across the organization. Currently, 50 of 94 scheduling units are using Staff Scheduling which has decreased the process of keying timesheet data into Payroll by 50%. The remaining units are scheduled to be implemented by Fall 2006. Approximately 80% of the organization will then be electronically scheduled requiring no timecard entry.

Once full implementation is complete, South Eastman Health plans to use Quadrant HR for HR enabling them to fully realize the benefits of a seamless, integrated Human Resources solution.