First Rate Travel Services is a joint venture between the Bank of Ireland and Post Office™ Ltd to provide outsourced foreign exchange solutions. Originally made up of thirty-five people, the firm now employs two hundred and forty staff in permanent roles, plus some fifty to sixty temporary staff. First Rate Travel Services’ largest customer continues to be the Post Office, although the company has a growing number of other corporate clients. First Rate Travel Services is currently the largest foreign exchange provider in the UK, handling an extensive range of currencies; and was the first company in the UK to provide foreign exchange with “0% commission”.

First Rate Travel Services currently operates from a number of geographically dispersed sites, including three main offices, four smaller sites and approximately two dozen home-based workers. The company plans to develop additional sites as the business grows and develops.

An e-HR system: supporting future expansion

HR Director, Joe Healy, first joined First Rate Travel Services in 2004, with a remit to develop the company’s HR function. One of the first areas he turned his attention to was the company’s need for an electronic HR system. At the time, the HR function was using a combination of spreadsheets, paper files, soft files and databases: the solution was neither sustainable nor scaleable. The firm urgently required a flexible system of workflow that would enable automation and streamlining of manual processes to support the planned growth. Clearly a system was required that would allow all HR data to be consolidated reducing the amount of manual processes and labour involved.

Why HR.net?

To meet these challenges, First Rate Travel Services opted to install HR.net, a powerful web-enabled HR system, developed by Vizual Business Tools plc. Using the latest .Net technology, HR.net allows any manual HR process to be replicated in electronic form, in real time. As a web-based system, HR.net is accessible by any employee, regardless of location. The system surmounts geographical challenges and supports remote working. Highly scaleable, HR.net has the capability to meet an organisation’s requirements as it expands and opens new sites.

Additionally, HR.net enables a wide variety of tasks (e.g. requesting holiday leave) to be carried out by employees on a 24/7, self-service basis. Importantly, HR.net also has a customisable workflow engine, databases and user interfaces, enabling organisations to automate standard HR procedures and digitise a range of other (non-HR specific) business processes.

Joe Healy, HR Director, First Rate Travel Services, commented:

“As an HR function we just couldn’t support the projected business growth in our previous setup. The manual systems; paper files, emails and spreadsheets were simply not sustainable. HR.net’s importance primarily lies in creating capability for the HR function to support our business both now and in the future”.

First Rate Travel Services has made use of HR.net to automate time sheets, which now feed directly into payroll. This removes a major headache: beforehand, the process was spreadsheet-based and cumbersome. Holiday approval and tracking, sick leave and recruitment procedures have also been digitised. Importantly, all automated processes take place live and enter HR.net’s database in real-time.

Lesley Baird commented that:

“The self-service aspect of HR.net allows each individual to take ownership of core administration processes and to get real time feedback on important processes. This has led to better engagement with these processes and a significant improvement in the quality of personnel data held.”

Cost Savings

HR.net will also enable First Rate Travel Services to achieve a number of cost savings, for example, by reducing the amount of administrative effort required to manage absence. The digitisation of processes is also bringing greater transparency to areas such as absence management, which should drive behavioural changes.

Solving the Intranet Challenge

HR.net has also played a critical role in the redesign of First Rate’s Intranet. Prior to theinstallation of HR.net, the Intranet (which was a custom-built system which had supported the company well during its initial phase of development) had only one point of posting, via the IT department. HR.net has been used to improve access to the intranet, enabling a number of “communities” to be created (i.e. for managers, employees etc), each with its own web page and access to the Intranet. In effect, HR.net allows a series of “mini-portals” to be created, through which various employee groups gain entry to the Company’s Intranet.

Joe Healy stated: “Now, there are ten points of entry to create information on to our intranet - in effect HR.net has widened the communication pipes so that more people can contribute and participate in the intranet. Each community can directly manage information – either static data or dynamic workflows - that they wish to share with the company”.

Access by business managers

Improvement to the company’s Intranet has also allowed business managers better access to information about their team members. On entering the Intranet, managers can retrieve HR related information about their teams and people (e.g. how many days’ holiday an employee has left) as well as update information about team members. This change both improves the quality and speed of access to information and reduces the amount of time managers spend requesting information from the HR department for employee related data. The intention is to promote a transfer of ‘HR skills’ and ‘HR information’ back to line managers.

The future

First Rate Travel Services is looking to automate all remaining manual HR processes: in the immediate future, the company intends to implement further HR.net standard workflows, including fleet management, procurement and expenses modules.