Digital major cleaning in Hamburg

While until a few years ago it was mainly IT companies, financial service providers and insurance companies that relied on electronic employee self-administration, more and more industrial and logistics groups are now also introducing ESS and MSS systems. When employees and managers have access to HR data, many time-consuming processes - such as managing vacation requests or changing addresses and phone numbers - are no longer necessarily the responsibility of the HR department.

The project to convert to electronic time recording was actually launched at Hamburg's city sanitation department in 2008, but the staff council vetoed its rapid implementation. "We very often experience that personnel and works councils are initially critical of electronic time recording," explains Andreas Blumendorf, Managing Director of Consodalis, which is now supporting SRH in the project. "On the one hand, they fear total control of employees, and on the other, they want to avoid employees sitting at their desks for unnecessarily long periods of time out of concern for their time status. But electronic time recording is more of an advantage than a disadvantage for employees: even the smallest amount of overtime is recorded precisely, and the monetary value of the time worked is much easier for individual employees to see."

Many systems - little transparency

The background to the effort to modernize time recording was the system inconsistency at Stadtreinigung Hamburg: In some departments, working hours were recorded via time cards, in others via a non-standardized software solution. Times were documented on paper. Special payments - such as travel allowances or on-call flat rates - had to be entered manually into the SAP system, as did vacation times and absences due to business trips. Apart from the time-consuming nature of this method of recording, there was no way of reconciling the working times with SRH's service agreements or with the statutory working time regulations.

With the new uniform solution, it should be possible to record and document working hours in the simplest possible way and without "media discontinuity", and the manual feeding of special pay should be eliminated. Likewise, any paper applications - vacation applications, applications for participation in seminars, etc. - should be eliminated. Finally, it should be possible to carry out binding checks on compliance with statutory working time requirements and applicable SRH service agreements.

In February 2014, the modernization of the time recording system was again on the agenda. Consodalis was chosen as the strategic partner for the implementation. The project implementation proceeded in several small steps. It began with an initial project meeting, followed by workshops with the Ahrensburg-based consulting firm and the individual departments at SRH. In the workshops, the specialists from Ahrensburg explained to the SRH managers exactly how the requirements specification could be met via a time management system and via ESS/MSS solutions based on SAP. The technical settings were started in September 2015. Three months later, in January 2016, the electronic time recording and ESS/MSS systems went live for all 620 salaried employees. In June, electronic time recording was extended to all blue-collar employees in the recycling centers and supplemented by electronic personnel resource planning. In the final implementation phase, all other industrial employees, such as refuse truck drivers, street cleaners and the canteen team, will also be integrated into the electronic time recording system.

Spectrum of use

The range of self-services available to employees and managers since the beginning of the year includes a time account overview, a request creation function for vacation and absence requests, and a team calendar. Every employee can view the daily bookings and time sheets and can subsequently enter forgotten clock-ins into the system. Managers can also generate reports on their employees in the form of lists (e.g. birthday lists, group lists), view quota levels and correct times manually. They can also call up attendance overviews and view appointment reminders - for birthdays or company anniversaries, for example. Finally, SRH as a whole now finally has the ability to monitor compliance with working time laws and document any violations.