Objectives Of The Subsystems Information Subsystem

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Human Resource Information System provides a method, by which an organization collects, maintains analyses and reports information on people and jobs. The information contained in the HRIS serves as a guide to recruiters, trainers, career planners and other human resource specialists. It applies to information needs at macro level as well as to the micro level.

Murdick and Ross consider the human resource management as a total system that interacts with other major systems of the organization, viz., marketing, production, finance, and the external environment. So, as a service function, to these major systems, its main responsibilities can be enumerated as forecasting and planning human resources, maintaining an adequate workforce, and controlling the manpower policies and programs of the enterprise.

Human resource Information system helps HR managers perform HR functions in a more effective and systematic way using technology. It is the system used to acquire, store, manipulate, analyze, retrieve, and distribute pertinent information regarding an organization's human resources. A human resource information system (HRIS) is a system used to acquire, store, manipulate, analyze, retrieve, and distribute pertinent information about an organization's human resources. The HRIS system is usually a part of the organization's larger management information system (MIS) which would include accounting, production, and marketing functions, to name just a few. Human resource and line managers require good human resource information to facilitate decision-making.

Typically, HRIS provides overall:

  Management of all employee information.

Reporting and analysis of employee information.

Company-related documents such as employee handbooks, emergency evacuation procedures, and safety guidelines.

Benefits administration including enrollment, status changes, and personal information updating.

Complete integration with payroll and other company financial software and accounting systems.

Applicant and resume management.

Objectives of the Subsystems Information Subsystem

Objectives/Requirements

Recruitment

Skills required.

Inventory of skills available.

Job specifications.

Placement

Matching available personnel against requirements.

Enabling use of tools and techniques to identify human capabilities for placement against properly organised work requirements.

Training and development

Developing talent requirements from within the organisation meeting demand for new skills.

Developing and maintaining a continuing skill inventory.

Pay and compensation

Maintaining traditional pay and financial records.

Compliance with government, union and other requirements.

Health safety and security

Health of personnel, safety of job practices in during operations, plant security classified information.

Maintenance

Ensuring success of personnel policies and procedures control over work standards measuring performance against financial plans and programmes.

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We have noted that a periodic and systematic analysis of the personnel records can be used for a variety of purposes such as:

• provide data essential to human resource planning,

• aid the evaluation of current personnel policies and practices,

• enable to produce an inventory of manpower, and

• Preparation of several reports and returns for submission to various government/non-government agencies, etc.

In manually operated personnel record systems, entries on forms and insertion of changes from time to time in the relevant records often fall behind so that the records are not showing the current position always. This leads to a fresh exercise toward collecting and compilation of original data elements, every time the information is required. All that can be very time consuming. Hence, let us look at some of the shortcomings inherent in manual personnel records systems so that the perspective of potential benefits of going in for a computerized personnel record and information system becomes clearer.

Deficiencies and drawbacks of the manual system: These include the following:

Cost: Manual systems involve significant clerical and routine administrative work load, the maintenance and updating of records being labour intensive and costly. In addition, the documentation being relatively non-standardises the same have to be provided time and again; the same have to be produced separately.

Accuracy: The manual transfer of data from one record to another increase the chances of error. It is not uncommon to find the data collected from the same source at different times or by different people giving almost a different picture. As a result, the accuracy and reliability of the manual system is held to be very much in doubt.

Fragmentation: Manually stored information is frequently held in a fragmented manner with different pieces of information being kept in separate files at different places. Thus, many manual systems are unable to provide a single comprehensive picture of an employee on one record.

Duplication: As it happens, some of the information held in the personnel records may be needed simultaneously by a number of other user departments, such as, payroll department/salary group, training department may like to keep duplicate records to meet their respective needs. Such practices are not only prone to duplication but add to the costs.

Computerized personnel records/information system: Some potential benefits:

While it would be presumptuous to assume that computerization would automatically solve all the problems associated with manual systems, in the fast changing technological and information processing environment, it does present several potential benefits:

Cost effectiveness: Taking into consideration the factors of time, speed and the enormous amount of data which a computer can process, the computerization offers an option. When personnel function faces conflicting pressures to provide more information while at the same time to reduce administrative overhead costs, the computerized system can become increasingly cost effective because in the long run the costs of computer hardware fall relatively to the cost of employing ever-increasing clerical staff.

Effective human resource information: Perhaps more than the cost effectiveness is the potential provided by computerization for establishing an effective human resource information system.

Improved accuracy: In addition, a computerised human resource information system can eliminate the shortcomings of manual system noted earlier. Significantly, computerised systems do not depend upon constantly copying out data form one record to another as in the manual system. That means the data is entered only once with provision for updating at regular intervals. Therefore, once the relevant data have been fed accurately, they will remain in pure form and accurate until any item is changed.

Validation of data-error detection: Further, availability of good software systems should enable validating and editing data and detecting errors in a number of ways such as:

Criterion checks for particular fields, for example, an error warning if a post is reserved for a certain category of person, if a salary is above or below a certain minimum/maximum, or if age exceeds 58 years and, so on.

APPLICATION OF HUMAN RESOURCE INFORMATION SYSTEM

Personal record keeping: The fundamental functions of computers in personal work are keeping employee records. A good personnel system should enable the personnel department to store all information currently held manually about employees on a computer. In addition, it should be possible for the user to keep historical files of past employees for purposes of identifying trends and making projections when developing human resource plans. It can also have personal records of those who can be temporarily or seasonally employed as is the case in tourism.

Report generation: Report generation is the capability which enables the user to manipulate any of the items stored on the data base as required by means of software referred to as ‘report generator’. That would mean facility for producing the more common standard reports, ad hoc enquiry facilities, and a diary facility. The diary facility can be called up to cover a certain period of time such as the forthcoming month, and will produce a list of action required by the personnel department on the basis of information held in the data base.

Recruitment: When organizations are engaged in recruitment campaigns, these can generate a considerable amount of administrative work. Under a computerized procedure, the basic details of applicants can be put into the computer and their progress through the recruitment procedure can be fed into the computer in the same way. Such a system can provide management with progress reports on the filling of vacancies and the status of the pending applications.

Wage and salary planning: Planning of wage and salary increases which otherwise is a time consuming process and fought with discrepancies in a manual system, can be easily handled by a good computer system.

Human resource planning: We have noted earlier that information is the strategic backbone of human resource planning. Computers are capable of assisting the process of human resource planning in several ways. Firstly, they greatly enhance the scope of the personnel department to analyze the structure and composition of the current labor force and to provide useful information for human resource planning purposes. Secondly, by using specially designed packages it would be possible to make projections and raise issues which can simulate future patterns of the organization’s human resource system. Further, the system will be readily able to identify weak spots and strong points through the process of generating information and its analysis. Additionally specialized modeling packages can be used for such applications as (i) for predicting wastage patterns, (ii) for simulating manpower flows into, within and outside the organization, and (iii) for simulating career structure against a range of assumptions about organizational growth or contraction.

Training and development: A computerized personnel records system provides organizations with speedier and ready access to information about the skills, education, qualification, appraisal ratings, career history, etc., of employees. This will help talent search within the organization as well as identification of training and developmental needs of employees at different levels.

Personnel costing and control: It is now possible to provide through a computerized information system line management with regular reports of staff numbers and costs against budgets or targets, including information on turnover, absenteeism, overtime levels and costs to serve as indicators of the organizations extent of efficiency in the utilization of its human resources.