Employee Self-Help Portal At Mudra Optimises HR Functions

Effective management of workforce is often a defining factor for the success of an enterprise. Human Resource Management is one area where complete automation has not yet been achieved by most organisations. Reputed ad agency Mudra Communications has taken the first step in this direction with the development of an employee self-help portal that allows complete automation of its HR activities.

Closed and Stagnant Payroll System called for a Change

Mudra has coined a unique name for its people’s wing. They refer to it as LLC (Leadership, Learning and Change) instead of calling it the HR department. This by itself portrays the company’s commitment towards the development of its employees. Earlier, the HR team at Mudra was burdened with several mundane and routine enquiries about salary break up, leave balance etc. Due to this, the team was unable to spend enough time on development activities.

The company’s earlier payroll system was based on the UNIX platform and had Ingres as a database. The system was accessible to only two or three people at Mudra’s corporate office in Ahmedabad. All the HR activities were thus centralised at the Ahmedabad office. As the business grew, the company realised that they can’t have a closed system any longer. The need for a Web-based system, which is accessible to people anytime, anywhere was felt. In order to address this need, Mudra’s IT team formulated in-house software to roll out its web-based initiative, which would in turn automate its HR activities.

EHRMS – One Stop Solution for HR, Business Managers & Employees

The IT team had rigorous discussions with the HR team as well as the employees to understand the lacunas of the earlier system and decide upon the features they would prefer to have in the new system. This gave shape to Mudra’s new system titled the ‘Employee Human Resource Management System’ or EHRMS, which is completely founded on open source. The system uses Linux as operating system, J2ee as development architecture and Oracle as database.

The EHRMS portal consists of different modules representing various HR functions. The important ones include Recruitment, HR Information, Payroll, Appraisal, Administrative and MIS module. The recruitment module allows storing of candidate database and allows free text search option similar to Google. It also provides facilities like dummy package calculation, issue of appointment letter etc. The company has a management plan, which contains certain predefined policies on staff headcount, salary etc, which act as a control mechanism. Whenever a particular department wishes to recruit a person, it has to fill in the manpower requisition form, which is tied with the management plan. This enables better control over the entire recruitment process.

Once the person joins as an employee, various details concerning him like training, qualification, experience etc get captured by the HR Information module and are saved in the central repository. Realising the talent identification needs of an advertising agency, Mudra has also incorporated a unique feature called ‘yellow pages’ for tracking of human resources i.e. employees based on their previous experience in a particular category, brand or consumer group. This feature helps them to quickly allot human resources for new projects.

Income tax computation is often a mind-boggling activity for the HR team. Earlier, Mudra had to send several mails to employees asking for details regarding their tax slabs etc. Now, it has developed an online form, which is filled by employees to make their tax declaration. Once the employee uploads the relevant details, HR can instantly view his/her tax liabilities. This online facility also lists investments options available to employees to work around their tax payments.

The MIS (Management Information System) is one of the most significant modules of the EHRMS. The staff cost feature of the module provides details of cost in terms of headcount as well as value at the enterprise level. It also allows the identification of cost per function, department and per employee. Besides, it can also provide a breakdown in terms of age, sex, cost, location experience etc.

This offers powerful control and management tools to the HR department and management while employees are empowered with updated information regarding leave balance, salary break-up, training, development, mediclaim etc. The agency had to exercise the utmost caution while making these facilities available. They had to ensure that each employee was able to access only his/her own details.

Change Management – A Major Challenge

It took Mudra almost nine months to implement the entire system. The complete automation of HR activities presented a whole set of challenges. Ajit Menon, president, Organisation Development, Mudra Group, says, “The foremost challenge was to educate and change the mindset of the people, who are used to systems working in a particular fashion. The existing department heads and business managers were educated first to accept these changes.”

The company created a dedicated IT team, which visited its various offices to give presentations and train people about the different features available on the portal.

Despite the efforts of the IT team, there was still a lack of awareness among employees. “We had to constantly educate them about the various features and facilities,” says P Sebastian, VP-IT, Mudra Communications. Employees certainly had apprehensions in the beginning to perform mundane tasks on their own. Giving an example, Sebastian cites the time when the company decided to accept employee IT declaration forms online. There were many hesitations and finally the company had to make a firm declaration that it would not accept physical forms the following year onward to ensure overall acceptance of the new system by employees. The portal has since then been made very user friendly. In the user log in, only eight to 10 relevant links are displayed, which helps to avoid confusion among employees.

Ensuring Optimum Utilisation of Human Resources

The new Web-based system helped Mudra to decentralise its HR activities across various branches. The online availability of the system also reduced the time lag in serving employees. It provided the top management with timely and accurate information on available manpower resulting in efficient management of the same.

Sebastian admits that prior to the implementation, almost 80 percent of the HR team’s time used to be spent dealing with routine and mundane work, whereas now the same demanded only 20 percent of their time. As a result, they are now able to concentrate better on their core functions of employee development and mapping.

The new system has also positively impacted employee productivity. The company did an RoI calculation about a year back, which revealed savings of Rs 26 lakhs, claims Sebastian. Menon says that the new system has given a lot of confidence to business heads to go ahead with their projects as they are assured of sufficient resources. Talent management and timely tracking of resources has thus helped Mudra to make optimum use of its human resources.

Future Plans

The company is now planning to adopt Adobe flex architecture, which will allow it to have an intuitive user interface in the form of Flesh. Sebastian reveals that the agency is also thinking of enabling the entire system on mobile phones while also adding to its analytical capacity.

In an industry such as advertising, where deadlines and creativity dictate the rules of the game, Mudra seems to have found a way out to not only effectively manage its human resources but also to make optimum utilisation of the same.