Our HR department awarded in Best Lean Management Implementation contest

They tamed chaos

It’s owing to them that all personnel affairs work perfectly well in our company. Here is our HR department which has just been awarded for the best case study of Lean Management implementation in service companies and in the administrative departments of manufacturing companies! The international jury appreciated the project by Agnieszka Aleksowicz, Ewa Skalska and Marzena Dudek with full participation of the whole HR team, entitled “From chaos to full control – how HR processes were optimized”. The competition was organized by Lean Enterprise Institute Polska. We congratulate our colleagues and express gratitude that they care for us so much!

The submitted projects were evaluated in five categories:

• project results,
• linking the project with the goals and challenges of the entire organization,
• impact of the project on the continuous improvement process in the company,
• the impact of the project on the involvement of management and staff in improvement,
• used methods and tools of improvement.

Etisoft HR department set a challenge and a goal to provide the highest level of service and Human Resource Management tools to our business managers. Recurring processes have been standardized, routines have been described, and every activity in the department is attributed to the person responsible for their implementation, which facilitates internal contact and handling of the matter within a specific timeframe. The assumptions of the project were and are consistent with the company’s objectives, i.e. with the timely execution of activities and the improvement of the processes efficiency, as well as their quality. The HR department has a support function for all other departments / areas, so standardizing the processes is essential to ensure that their implementation and maintenance are simple and understandable to everyone.

The implemented solutions include:

• internal audit of all processes,
• analysis and definition of all processes,
• every change of process was discussed,
• every solution was verified after its implementation, taking into account the requests / suggestions of allprocess participants, including customers,
• an operating system designed by the HR team to support delivered processes was provided,
• cooperation and communication levels are defined between departments,
• visual document management was used,
• the systems were tailored to the needs of the organization,
• a training package from the aforementioned systems was provided,
• a matrix of competence and responsibility was created for HR staff,
• checklists for complex processes have been created,
• the kanban table is used in everyday work,
• roles were split in the department – responsibility for soft HR was separated from hard HR,
• manuals and instructions have been created for both HR staff and customer users, e.g. systems supporting management,
• a list of described and updated processes has been created (63 of them today), including project activities,
• POKA YOKA was used in support systems.

And all this resulting for the general idea of Lean that each employee knows what to do, how, when and with the use of what tools

It must be emphasized that the HR department, when implementing its project, received full support from the board of management and staff and the change was preceded by a divisional “brainstorming”. This enabled each of the department members to design their processes / activities, gaining the ability to effectively influence the processes in the organization. We can now talk about specific results. Their measurable effect is eliminating many problems, minimizing the risk of errors, reducing the number of documents and saving time of HR staff and all other employees of the company.

As emphasize the authors, one of the basic aims of the project was to initiate the process of continuous improvement by convincing employees to change. Currently HR processes have been stabilized, enabling them to be tracked and streamlined, including the level of KPIs set.

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