Sainsbury’s is to invest £12 million in a centralised HR services centre that can beam documents to in-store managers. John Stokdyk investigates the growing trend for HR to embrace electronic document management.

The recent announcement that Sainsbury’s is going to open a shared HR services centre in Manchester raised the profile of networked, paperless environments. The £12 million investment will create a centralised HR admin system to support the efforts of managers in the chain’s 780 local supermarkets.

Due to adverse publicity about the potential job losses, Sainsbury’s director Imelda Walsh declined to talk to HR Zone about the project, but in a press statement, she explained: "[HR shared services] will increase efficiency, simplify processes and eliminate duplication."

Where the corporate giants lead, others will follow. Laser treatment specialist Optimax is not investing to quite the same level as Sainsbury’s, but is following a very similar paperless route with a TokOpen system from document management specialist Tokairo. HR manager Janice Ireland recently joined Optimax and told HR Zone that the document management system will handle all of the organisation’s administrative needs, which include handling patient consent forms and medical records as well as internal policies, procedures and HR documentation.

"When the system does go live [early next year], I will be looking forward to utilising all the facilities it offers," she says.

Share documents across remote locations

In both cases the centralised electronic storage system will make it possible to share documents with remote locations across the company network. Conversations with HR and paperless system suppliers confirm that electronic document management is becoming increasingly prevalent within HR.

There are several pressures coming to bear on HR, according to Version One’s Richard Abraham. "HR departments are looking at themselves to see how they can maximise efficiency and are starting to put more emphasis on storing HR records electronically. If you’ve got multiple sites and one centralised HR process, then the ability to look at documents remotely is a key requirement."

In many cases, electronic storage is being forced on organisations by regulatory requirements laid down in the Data Protection Act, and rules governing document storage (BS 7799 Information Security Management Systems) and legal admissibility for court evidence (PD0008).

HR is a paper-intensive activity, says Abraham: "There may well be tens of documents generated for each employee, and if people stay with you for long periods, that can become a storage problem from a paper point of view."

Keith Brown, business manager for the Topaz EMS, acknowledged the same factors and added that there is often a green bonus for companies who adopt paperless technology. "Having good document management systems so you can look at things like appraisal forms on screen and don’t have to print them all out helps your carbon footprint – and that’s becoming increasingly important to many businesses," he says.

Return on investment

The return on investment for paperless systems is fairly consistent. Less phyiscal space will be needed to store paper documents, saving on office or offsite storage costs. Speeding up the time it takes to retrieve documents presents an unquantifiable saving, but if those papers are copied or faxed internally, it may save the organisation 10-15p a sheet each time.

Scanning CVs, appraisals, sick notes and the like and storing them on disk can save space and cash, make a more accessible archive and even help the organisation to feel good about its environmental profile. But more significant improvements can arise if paperless technology is integrated more closely into the organisation’s HR processes, according to Abraham.

Last year, Version One became part of the COA group which develops the OpenPeople HR software suite. Abraham’s job involves working with his colleagues to link Version One’s dB Archive system into the self-service OpenPeople environment.

"We’re working on an interactive recruit-to-retire document environment within HR that will follow the employee through their entire life cycle within the organisation," Abraham explains.

"The employee’s documents will be held in a controlled folder structure linked to the HR system so they can go in and find their own forms, appraisals and records without having to trouble HR. The documents will also be available in departmental and group views for line managers and HR."

Coping with the variety of document types within HR is one advantage of computerised storage, but it can complicate the implementation process.

"Documents can have different retention policies and retrieval procedures. You’re often dealing with sensitive personal information, so there are different rules about who can see what, which makes classification more complex than finance documents," Abraham comments.

Automated retention policies

For example, disciplinary records may be put on file for a specified period and then removed and destroyed. Electronic storage makes it possible to automate retention policies for specific documents, rather than having to trawl through filing cabinets to remove them by hand.

"There aren’t the same hard and fast rules you get around purchase invoices, which are quite regulated," Abraham remarks. "With an invoice, you store it for seven years and get rid of it. While HMRC cares about the contents of an invoice, there are no standard formats or storage requirements for the different HR document types.

The biggest trap for HR teams that want to automate document storage is coming to terms with this diversity of documentation. "Make sure you give enough time at the start of the project to look at each individual document type and put together good classifications," he advises.

"Work out how to keep them, how you’re going to search for them and how you are going to get things out in a meaningful format – for individuals as well as line managers, and departments who might want to relate documents to job roles."

This conceptual thinking was part of a wider change which has seen HR taking a more considered view of how documents are being used within organisations, Abraham explains. "Bringing in an element of control means that line managers are less likely to use different sets of home-grown criteria. When you’re dealing with internal appraisal documents, for example, standardisation can mean fewer problems."