Digital personnel file in the Golden City

Ceská Sporitelna, the largest bank in the Czech Republic headquartered in Prague, must grant each of its approximately 11,000 employees access to their personnel files from their workstations.

In line with the new regulations, the financial services provider reorganized its HR department and moved its location from Prague to the suburb of Kladno. The digitization of documents was intended to simplify this move.

In addition, the HR department decided to make other human resources (HR) processes paperless. For example, employees are now provided with their pay slips digitally via access to their own personnel files, rather than in paper form.

When selecting a provider of a digital personnel file, the choice fell on Circle Unlimited and the solution cuSmarText HR in Czech. The implementation was handled by s IT Solutions AT Spardat according to a four-phase concept. s IT Solutions is the IT provider of Erste Group from Central and Eastern Europe and of the savings banks in Austria.

At the beginning of the project, the plan was to set up the subsequent digital personnel file. To this end, s IT Solutions worked closely with the HR department for around six weeks. Together, they developed a clear folder structure (e.g. employment contract, payroll, application documents, other person-related documents) with around 60 main folders and subfolders for the audit-proof storage of personnel documents.

"Well thought-out folder management is one of the success factors when introducing a digital personnel file. It forms the basis for further decisions such as the definition of access groups and the associated authorization logic".

Andrea Ziegler, Solution Manager at s IT Solutions, explains, adding:

"Sufficient time must be scheduled and spent on this."

SAP integration and self-service portal

After completing the folder management, s IT Solutions started implementing the software solution cuSmarText translated into Czech. SAP HR and SAP ESS/MSS were already in use at the bank. In this context, Andrea Ziegler mentions one of the main reasons why the decision was made in favor of Circle Unlimited:

"The solution is fully SAP-integrated. This means that without any further development effort, the digital personnel file is automatically generated for every employee created in SAP HR."

To give all employees access to their personnel files now, s IT Solutions made use of the existing web-based employee self-service portal. In addition, managers use a special manager self-service portal to gain insight into their employees' personnel files. Both were linked to the digital personnel file software.

Preparation and digitization

"At that time, we were faced with around 300,000 personnel documents in the Ceská Sporitelna archives that had to be digitized and transferred to the new system. To solve this big task, we decided to use barcode technology."

recalls Josef Gram, project manager at s IT Solutions.

To this end, s IT Solutions, with the support of Circle Unlimited, developed a barcode scenario that resulted in a print version of barcode stickers. The barcodes themselves were generated directly from the digital file.

The stickers were then printed on multifunction devices, affixed to the documents and finally released for scanning. The scanning of the digitized documents into the folders of the personnel file was then automated.

For this purpose, the documents were compressed in ZIP files, transferred to cuSmarText HR, then "unzipped" and assigned to the correct personnel file via the barcode and by means of job control. If the system could not recognize documents, they were returned to the bank for checking as part of error handling.

The process of digitization, from barcode generation and scanning to scanning and matching, took the most time of the project, about half a year.

Josef Gram looks back:

"We had originally planned two to three months for this. Just how time-consuming digitization is and what timeframes need to be set here is certainly one of the lessons learned."

Access control: authorization concept

Around 11,000 employees at 15 locations of Ceská Sporitelna and its subsidiaries were to be given insight into their personnel files, and HR staff were to work with the software themselves.

To this end, s IT Solutions and Circle Unlimited created a multi-level authorization concept with 15 different user groups and their roles. For example, the final deletion of personnel documents is now the responsibility of only a few members of the HR team.

"The authorization concept is very complex and the process of creating it was time-consuming. Looking back, it is recommended to define access permissions at the very beginning of a project. Otherwise, functional tests that have already been carried out have to take place again from the point of view of access authorization."

describes Andrea Ziegler. The primary criterion for assigning access rights was the employee's function in the company. A distinction was made both within the HR department and between managers, employees and third-party departments.

All employees throughout the company were given access to their personal data, employment contracts and salary slips. However, they do not have access to all the documents relating to their applications and employment. Only authorized persons from the HR department have access to these documents.

Infrastructure for mass printing

In addition to the electronic personnel file, the bank decided on a solution for the automatic creation of HR-relevant documents. Here, too, the choice fell on Circle Unlimited and its cuDocument Builder software.

It creates new documents fully automatically from pre-formulated text modules and personal data and provides them with a barcode if required.

This was the topic that s IT Solutions addressed in the last phase of the project. The focus was on mass printing. The particular challenge was to simultaneously generate documents that concerned different companies within the banking group, i.e. Ceská Sporitelna itself or one of its subsidiaries.

s IT Solutions and Circle Unlimited has succeeded in automatic control to select the right document template depending on the company. Thus, logos and layout related to each company are now selected using the same document content during mass printing.

The templates can be found in a so-called Template Library. In order to fill the documents with data from SAP HR, the required fields were defined and stored in a Clause Library.

Both "libraries" are based on numerous conditions as to what is meaningful when and how, and accordingly to be filled with text and data for mailings. The bank's HR team uses the automatic document generation to create mass printouts such as annual salary increases, but also documents such as new service contracts in the event of internal changes, and much more.

Employees can now access their personnel files at any time via self-service portals in accordance with legal requirements. HR colleagues have the option of accessing the digital file directly from the SAP system and easily viewing all important documents and personnel data.

They no longer have to wait for folders or move them from one department to another. The bank was also particularly interested in the improved workflow when an employee joins or leaves the company, as well as in internal transfers.

For example, employment contracts are now automatically created, printed out and ready for signature. To date, the bank has created over 17,000 digital personnel files in the system and archived over 330,000 documents there.

"We started the project at the end of 2012 and the system went live in January 2014. The close cooperation with Circle Unlimited's consulting team throughout the project and the opportunities the software solutions offered us were crucial to the success of this major project"

Josef Gram concludes.