Topic: People Resourcing and Development

Order Description

CASE STUDY
Young People’s Fashion PLC and HRIS

Background information to Young People’s Fashion PLC
Young People’s Fashion PLC is a retail fashion company located in the North of England. It was established in the mid-1990s and has grown steadily over the past 10

years and in 2005 is expected to have 25 stores and employs over 600 people. The company has clearly espoused values with a strong focus on the people it employs. As

the shops are spread over quite a wide geographical area, they strive to put together a management team before opening a new shop to ensure that the organisational

values are embedded within the culture of the new shop from the start. So far, more than 80 per cent of their current stores are managed by people who have been

promoted from within. As with many new businesses, their systems are mainly manual and the HR Director recognises that if they were to continue to grow, to sustain

their values and their desire to continue to give power to the store manager, they would need to invest in technology that would support that vision. The management

team within the organisation identified its information priorities so that this would form the basis of the assessment and purchase of a new Human Resources

Information System (HRIS). They identified two overriding priorities that were required from the system:
First, the system should support the line manager by providing easy access to information for the day-to-day management of the store.
Second, the system should provide quality strategic information to allow the directors to monitor progress.
Information needs
The organisation undertook a high level analysis to determine the main criteria for selecting a HRIS. This analysis identified three main criteria. First, that the

system should be able to manage the growing volume of data without requiring the organisation to make changes to their business processes. Second, the company wanted a

single database to include both HR and payroll, which was centrally managed but accessible by all managers to enable capture of the data at source. Third, a

sophisticated reporting system that allowed managers at all levels to have access to information appropriate to their decision-making level.

Case study tasks

Young People’s Fashion PLC has to start now the process of purchase and implementation of the new system. If you, as an HR business partner, were a participant in the

working party to complete this project how would you address the following questions?

1. What research should the working party do to identify a shortlist of suppliers?
2. What team should be brought together to view the systems demonstrated by the short listed suppliers?
3. List the range of issues that you think should be explored with the suppliers at the demonstrations.
4. When the organisation has made the decision on the purchase of a system, the issues associated with implementation must be addressed. If you, as an HR business

partner, were a member of the implementation team, how would you analyse the following requirements?

a) Who would you expect to be on the implementation team?
b) How would you establish the baseline data for the new system?
c) What training needs can you identify and how will these be addressed?
d) What criteria for success will the implementation team set and how will these be measured?

This case study focuses on HR information systems and e-enabled HR. Technology is being used increasingly and in a variety of ways to support HR activities (e.g.,

organizational intranet, e-learning, online-recruitment and selection, payroll, etc). The rationale for introducing HRIS include: Improving quality, speed, flexibility

of information, reducing the administrative burden and improving services to employees.

Reference:
Pilbeam, S. and Corbridge, M. (2010) People Resourcing and Talent Planning: HRM in practice, 4/E Financial Times Press