Barnardo's Implements Oracle Human Capital Management

In the past 14 years:

• Barnardo’s permanent headcount has doubled to more than 8,000.
• Barnardo’s has 15,000 registered volunteers.
• Barnardo’s’ chain of charity shops has grown significantly and provides a vital stream of income.

Throughout this period of progress, Barnardo’s has continued to invest in its use of Oracle HCM with major projects undertaken to rollout Self-Service Human Resources (HR) and iRecruitment.

However, the underlying Oracle HCM work structures have fundamentally remained the same.

The use of a complex position structure was preventing Barnardo’s from realising the benefits of their existing HCM implementation, resulting in:

• A significant investment in time to maintain positions.
• Frustration for users and the HR team due to the duplication of data; complex and confusing structure.
• Lack of confidence in the system due to data inconsistencies.
• Potential complexity and difficulty in the usage and deployment of Talent, Recruitment, Learning, Payroll and Finance.
• The change in the nature of Barnardo’s’ business and the increase in size and complexity, led to a situation where the management of positions had become complex, time consuming and restrictive.
• 26,014 positions have been defined.
• 14,000 positions are active.
• 5,042 positions are currently used.
• There is an active workforce of over 8,000 employees.

• Current position, plus aspiring to One Barnardo’s.
• Consolidate and standardise – be radical.
• Streamline – consistent business processes, manage by exception.
• Efficiencies – working smarter, added-value.
• Enabling – improved user experience.
• Maximise – improve the return on Total Cost of Ownership of software functionality.

During the workshops, it became clear that the use of Position in their original format was unsustainable. Barnardo’s had transformed into an agile and flexible organisation with a rapidly growing retail business. The need for a flexible, maintainable, transparent and understandable set of work structures could not be achieved with the current set-up of almost 3,000 organisations, 67 jobs and a 6 segment Position structure.

After careful consideration, it was determined that a move from a Position-based structure, to using jobs only, could achieve all of Barnardo’s’ objectives.Barnardo’s didn’t use any of the unique functionality often associated with Positions such as Position Budgeting, Position Hierarchy for Approvals, Position Hierarchy for Security, Positions to drive Self-Service or establishment reporting. There would be no significant loss of functionality by moving away from Positions.

Claremont, together with Barnardo’s’ HR team, designed a job structure that provided consistency, clarity and ease of maintenance. The two-segment structure provided a combination of Job Category and Job Title, allowing Barnardo’s to report at a variety of levels and expose the entire job via Self-Service without the confusion. This has reduced the maintenance overhead ten-fold.

Barnardo’s’ HR team undertook a significant data cleansing and mapping exercise and the 5,042 active positions were mapped to 600 new jobs. These new jobs are spread across 20 well-defined categories.

Working together with Barnardo’s’ experienced Oracle team, Claremont developed the migration framework and delivered the technical components which ensured that the transition to the new work structures was a smooth process. The Barnardo’s team ensured that all professional and self-service functions continued to meet the needs of their business.

Work Structure in Oracle HCM provides the backbone of any Enterprise Resource Planning solution and is vital for reporting, security and representing the HCM view of the business.

It is vital that they are maintained and reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that they are still fit for purpose. Barnardo’s has been able to realise the following benefits.

• Significant reduction in work structure maintenance overheads.
• Simplified & understandable work structures.
• Growing confidence in data / system.
• Simplified reporting.
• Reducing the complexity of future rollouts of Talent / Recruitment / Learning / Payroll / Self-Service and additional Financial modules.

It has also avoided the need for re-implementation when Barnardo’s moved to the next version of Oracle E-Business Suite.