iHRIS Manage Saves Time Locating Employee Records
Last spring, the HR management (HRM) department at the MOH in Uganda requested the Capacity Project’s assistance with implementing iHRIS Manage, the Project’s free and Open Source HR management software, to monitor the number of health workers deployed in the country by cadre and district. In response, iHRIS Manage was installed at the MOH and in two pilot districts in the north this fall. In December, the MOH’s records office completed data entry, entering all of their paper records on central MOH employees into the new system. Now, there is a team performing data cleaning.
As part of a recent HRIS evaluation in the country, a team of evaluators visited the records office and spoke with some of the staff. One of the Records Officers present mentioned he had access to the system during data entry, but no longer does because access is limited during the data cleaning phase. The Records Officer said that he wants access again as soon as possible because, he explained, “At the end of the day, I could find a file fast. And I liked it.”
The records office initiates the work of the HRM department and, the way the paper system is now, that department cannot do their job to properly respond to HR issues until they have access to employees’ paper files. When a file is requested, the Records Officers are usually only given an employee’s name and asked to locate his/her file, but the files are arranged in numerical order by file #. Looking at the above snapshot of the records office, you can see how hard it could be for a Records Officer to find a file, with all the paper files on the shelves! When the Records Officer had access to the system, he could search for an employee by name, pull up the record, find the file #, and then easily find the paper file. He said that this access to iHRIS Manage saved him time, “The manual system is tiresome. It can take you all day to find one file.” This is a simple example of how an electronic HRIS can save much needed time, effort, and head ache!
Since the Records Officer does not have authority to edit records, the system administrator is now working on creating a new access level that will allow him to only view a record, and therefore quickly find the required file #. Sometimes, however, even when he locates the file #, the Records Officers cannot find a paper file at all. “Files get lost,” he said, “They can be brought to one office and left there, and never recorded.” When the iHRIS Manage software is fully implemented and operational, files entered will no longer disappear, and will be able to be pulled up instantly with the click of a mouse and appear on the computer screen.