Auckland City Council sees benefits of SAP solution

Auckland City Council is seeing the benefits after implementing a fully-integrated SAP Human Resources Information System (HRIS) in February in order to better manage its 2300 employees.

The project had been in the works for 14 months before it went live in February and Auckland City Council’s Manager of Enterprise Applications, Peter Blackwell, said that after some light training, the feedback he’s heard from managers and employees has been very positive. The solution includes one channel for employees and another for managers, each with access through a web portal.

Blackwell said that the system has allowed the council to better understand the needs of employees and said, “Manager self service (MSS) allows our manager to look after their own data without asking HR or payroll. We’ve also dramatically improved our understanding of our workforce through HR reporting and metrics.”

Blackwell said that because the Auckland City Council is so large and many employees don’t work traditional hours from 9 to 5 behind a computer, the SAP solution was a good fit in order to decrease the paper trail and increase the efficiency and productivity of the workforce in addition to getting more insight into trends among workers.

“For us there’s huge advantages based on the number of staff we have at Auckland City, but also the variety of work those kind of people undertake,” he said.

Auckland City Council has been running SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) since 2000 and Blackwell said it was a clear-cut choice for SAP when choosing an HRIS system based on its capability and respected system.

“It’s about getting the best out of our investment on behalf of our ratepayers,” he said.