DEVELOPMENT OF HR INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR AN AEROSPACE INDUSTRY 1-MBA Student, 2-Assistant Professor, Department of MS, M.S.Ramaiah School of Advanced Studies, Bangalore 3-HR Manager, Taneja Aerospace and Aviation Ltd *Contact Author e-mail: shilpa.rg@msrsas.org Abstract The usage of a proper HR Information System (HRIS) has always been an important contribution for the HR (HR) operation in any organisation to work effectively. HR is one of the important functions of any industry. Hence it is important to keep this function equally efficient and effective compared to other operations in an organisation. One of the factors which contribute to the proper functioning of HR operation is data. Storing, analysing, processing and retrieving of data for decision making become necessary in this context. In the current study, the existing manual systems and processes in the HR department has been studied and observed. By studying the various processes with the help of tools like flow charts, use cases and data flow diagrams various parameters has been analysed. The HRIS has been designed using object oriented analysis and design methodology along with PHP version 5.0 for the front end and MySQL as backend database. Various forms like employee information, leave approval has been designed. Partial implementation of HRIS with Leave Management System as one of the modules has been carried out. Various reports like new and existing employees, leave pending/approval has been created. The HRIS has been implemented against the existing system on internal server with Windows operating system which reduced 49.24% of time compared to the existing system. The developed HRIS will help the organisation to effectively store employee data more securely and accurately. This study can be further extended in implementation of other modules of HRIS like recruitment, training and development, compensation, benefits and payroll. Keywords: Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Data Flow Diagram, Use Cases Abbreviations HRIS HR Information System LMS Leave Management System MIS Management Information System SCM Supply Chain Management CRM Customer Relationship Management FMS Financial Management System TAAL Taneja Aerospace and Aviation Ltd 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Overview of Management Information System Management Information System (MIS) has become one of the most important integral parts of any organization. MIS integrates all the operations under one roof which makes the factors for decision making more appropriate and transparent. In the world of high competition and organizations bearing competitive advantages over each other, it becomes essential to make complicated transactions and operations a little easier [9]. MIS interlinks various functions in an organization and makes things automated which would have been done manually. As manpower is also very crucial and optimum usage of resources become important to reduce cost and time, MIS helps remove extra costs involved in manual systems. There are various types of Management Information Systems which fit into various different operations / departments in an organization. Few of them are Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Financial Management System (FMS) etc. MIS has various benefits when implemented in an organization [10]. 1.2 Advantages of Management Information System [7] Planning and Control: MIS gives important information keeping various data transparent to management. This helps in proper planning and control of factors which are important and are responsible for the betterment of the organization [8]. Automation: MIS has taken out a lot of manual work which were previously executed in various departments in an organization. This helps in reducing extra man power and costs involved in manually feeding or altering any data after transactions. Integration: MIS helps in integrating different departments of an organization. For instance finance being linked with HR department for pay cycle, deductions etc. Any updates which could result a change in a field in the department is automatically altered by the system. De - Centralization: MIS works on a centralized platform but also gives the ability of data process and storage to users in different departments. Hence data can be modified at any level making it a De - Centralized system. 1.3 Types of Management Information System [12] Few MIS available presently in the market are as follows: Decision Support Systems Enterprise Resource Planning HR Information System SASTECH Journal 52 Volume 10, Issue 1, May 2011
Supply Chain Management Customer Relationship Management Financial Information System. 1.4 HR Information System HR Information System is an information system, which is basically used to track data relating to HR. It is one of the Management Information Systems. There has been a lot of change as to how employee data were stored before compared to present systems used in organization. It integrates information like employee details, pay roll, benefits, performance tracking and appraisal etc. [5]. This study focuses on designing an effective HR Information System and implementing an Online Employee Leave management. The attempt to implement Employee Leave management would mainly focus on removing long processes involved in communication between the employee and HR manager making it easier for both, the employee and the HR manager to request and approve/reject leaves respectively [3]. Technological advancement led to a lot of changes in HR Management. The storage of data was now shifted from manual ledgers and books to computer hard drives and magnetic tapes. Storage of data became easier and a lot of manual work was removed. HR Management was later seen as a strategic building platform which dealt with the most important resource of any organization. Hence it came to be known as Strategic HR Management (SHRM). The HR Management had total make over when HR Information System was brought into implementation [2]. 1.5 Modules of MIS The growth in SHRM increased the demand for useful information about HR and HRIS played a major role in bridging the gap for decision making. Few functions of various modules in HRIS are explained below [6]: Payroll Module: This module of HRIS focuses on automating the pay process by collecting the attendance and time log in-out and calculating the taxes, deductions and generating tax reports. Work time Module: This module collects the data which is time related. The number of hours logged in by an employee is calculated. The output of this module becomes an input for the Payroll Module Benefits Module: This module helps gather information for administrating and tracking employee participation in various programs of benefits. This module is also made up of insurance, compensation, profit sharing and post retirement Recruiting Module: This module helps in analyzing potential applicants and recruiting through online job portals and publications. Training Module: The training module helps develop various learning programs for employees. It also helps generate reports on performance after training.[1] A recent addition to HRIS is the Leave Management System [11]. At the beginning, if an employee needed to take a leave, the process was manually carried out where the employee would write a letter to the reporting manager and the HR stating the number days of leave required and the reason for the same. It would normally take 4 to 5 days for the employee to get a confirmation from his manager and HR. But the delay from the employee s manager and HR s side also had a reason. Any request for leave by employees had to be verified by HR and reporting manager to find out if the employee has any leaves left in the balance, to find out if there are any other people available for temporary replacement and also update the same in the books which is again a manual process[4]. 2. PROBLEM DEFINITION The present HRIS system at TAAL Technologies involves a lot of manual feeding. The employee data is stored in the excel sheet and various other important factors like attendance records, pay roll, insurance, holiday listings etc are stored under different fields in excel. Excel has macros which is a feature very helpful to automate few calculations. But as the number employees increase and the data doubles, it becomes highly inefficient to store and process data and uses the derived information to make decisions. The Leave system at TAAL Technologies involves few steps which are manually executed by the employee, the reporting manager and the HR. It becomes complicated to check for available leaves, update the information, increment/ decrement leave numbers of the employee manually. 3. DATA COLLECTION Since this study aims at designing an effective HR Information System (HRIS) and implementing online Leave Management System (LMS), it was a necessity to collect important information from the HR Manager at TAAL Technologies. From the interaction, the working of the present information system was understood. It was observed that many functions like attendance system, leave approval, pay roll and performance were still manually driven. Annual leaves balance had to be manually updated and it was resulting in tedious activities. The interaction also revealed the company s requirement for HRIS which gave a basic outline of how the application could be designed. Interacting with HR manager was continuous and parallel process running along with other data collection methods. The requirements were jotted down and were used to design the framework of LMS and HRIS design. Another aspect linked with the design of effective HRIS is not only aligned for organizational benefits but also to give employees the opportunity to interact with the HR family directly without much procedures and processes. Hence interacting with employees was important. The interaction revealed how employees applied for leave and how information was communicated from the HR team to employees. It was understood that information like leave, holidays, personal data, etc were stored in a decentralised fashion i.e. the information was stored only on the local drive of HR department. The present HRIS system at TAAL also gave an outline of how the effective system should behave. The working of the HRIS at TAAL Technologies was observed and the functions involving manual work were SASTECH Journal 53 Volume 10, Issue 1, May 2011
noted down. The hardware and software frame work on which the HRIS was residing was analysed. This helped in understanding the portability and scalability factors which had to be kept in mind while designing the effective HRIS and LMS application. 4. ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION The primary data collected here helped to understand the present HR Information System and its loop holes. The Leave Management System was understood in detail and the procedures followed were analysed. After gathering all the information and understanding TAAL s requirement for the new HRIS and Leave Management System, the basic design was framed. 4.1 Working of the Present LMS The leave management system process at TAAL can be divided into three parts, HR admin process, reporting manager process and employee Process. When an employee at TAAL wants to apply a leave, the following process takes place. Employee Process: Employee writes an email stating the kind of leave he/she wants to apply giving the reason for the leave and the days of leaves. Employee sends the email to the HR manager and a copy to the reporting manager. Employee waits for the response from HR manager. Reporting Manager Process: Manager receives the email from employee. He/ She checks the priority of role in the study and also checks for the availability of a fill in. He/she then responds to HR giving the status. Status could be either a reject or a confirmation. HR Manager Process: HR manager receives email from employee and reporting manager. According to the status given by reporting manger, He/She looks for the history of leaves taken by the employee. If the employee has leaves valid, HR manager sends and email to the Employee and a copy to the reporting manager stating whether the leave is approved or not. If the leave is not approved, the manger gives the reason for the same. The HR manger updates the leave balance. 4.2 Loop Holes in the Present System Data is been stored in non centralized system. HR Admin has to literally observe email at regular intervals frequently to see any new queries or requests. Employee has to write an email stating which kind of leave he is going to apply with the reason and send a copy to the reporting manager and one copy to the HR Admin. If any further queries, both the HR admin and the employee again have to communicate through same means. In this process, communication the most important thing which remains a factor of improvement in the present system. Due to this process, time becomes an essential factor. Faster the data transaction, faster is the communication and hence an effective system. The present system is not time efficient. No validation on redundancy. No leave constraints defined. Excel is being used as an interface. Application is prone to malwares and cause data loss. Excel would become inefficient in storing large employee data. It becomes tedious for a HR Admin to manually operate data transaction 4.3 Developed System Data Flow Diagram (DFD) Figure 1 Context level DFD explaining HRIS process The above DFD gives the basic functionality of the HR information system. The entities here are HR manager and the employee. Each of these entities has individual roles during the process. The HR manager logs into the HRIS application and does a transaction. The transaction would consist of feeding and fetching data [14]. Data can be employee information, reports, performance check etc. Similarly an employee can access his/her information through the application and feed/fetch data. A system administrator maintains the backend. Here HRIS application is the user interface which is developed using PHP and MySQL. The developed HRIS is big and it wouldn t be possible to show the DFD for all the functions here. Hence one of the functions about employee details is shown below. A lot of fields are validated and updated manually. (For instance: Type of leave, remaining leaves for a particular employee). SASTECH Journal 54 Volume 10, Issue 1, May 2011
Figure 2 First Level DFD explaining HRIS process It is clearly seen that the process begins with validation of the username and password. Failing to do so would result in invalid login and would restrict in application entry. When validation succeeds, the application allows the homepage to be displayed where the HR manager has various options. The dashboard of HR admin is discussed in the following chapter. In this case, the HR searches for a particular employee either by first name, last name, employee id etc. The search function collects the request information and initializes a search process sending request information to the database server. The server then matches the data type, fetches data and sends the collected data back to the application which leads to the result page. Similarly all other searches are done on similar pattern. Each functional process has its own complex data flow diagram. 4.4 Use Case Diagram for the Developed LMS Use case is a tool basically used in system and framework designing. It shows the actor s role in the process and helps understand the interface between the actors and the system. The above diagram gives the use case for the developed leave management system Here there are three actors called employee, reporting manager and hr manager. Each of these actors plays important roles in the entire process of leave management. Here the actors are depicted with the human like figure. Each of their roles is defined with the oval object. The roles are placed within the boundaries of the leave management system. 5. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION The designing of the application was divided in two parts namely, the front end design and the back end design. Before going ahead with the design the requirement had to be analysed. It had to be understood that the application should be scalable, easily installable and durable. Keeping the basic requirements in mind, software and hardware requirements were written down. The application was designed using PHP version 5.0 and HTML (Hyper Text Mark up Language). Since there was need of the application to be a web application running on local server, the application had to be designed using the above mentioned programming languages. 5.1 Login Page In the following section, the snap shots of front end interface and backend data storage design which includes tables, rows columns and various other validation processes are shown. Figure 4 Login Page The above figure shows the screen shot of the HRIS. The login sector has been circled red. Here the employee as well as admin can login through the application. This remains a common window for all 5.2 HR Manager Home Page Figure 3 Use Diagram showing LMS process Figure 5 HR Manager Home Page The dashboard shown above consists of fields like HR Consists of various fields which has to be fed by HR (partially implemented) SASTECH Journal 55 Volume 10, Issue 1, May 2011
Personal Information Management (PIM) Consists of Employee information fields. Leave Leave Management System (Completely implemented) Time Shift timings Benefits Not implemented Recruitment Online Job portal (Partially implemented) Performance Key Performance Indicators (Partially implemented) Reports Generates employee performance reports (Partially implemented) Bug Tracker only for internal Admin use Help contains PDF files as manuals. 5.3 Admin Tabs Expanded Figure 13 Leave summary page Leave summary consists of fields namely Employee Name, Leave Type, Leave Entitled, Leave Taken (Days), Leave Scheduled (Days), and Leave Remaining (Days) Figure 14 Define days off Figure 15 Leave tabs defined Figure 6 Admin Figure 7 Company Info Tab Figure 16 Online leave application Figure 8 Job Tab Figure 9 Qualification Tab Figure 10 Personal Information tab Figure 17 Generation of Email The above is the email notification sent to HR and Reporting manager after the employee applies for the leave. 5.5 Database Structure Figure 11 Employee Information Page 5.4 Leave Tab Expanded Figure 12 Leave tab defined Figure 18 Database View 1 To store the basic information for employees, a table called HR_employee had been created with SASTECH Journal 56 Volume 10, Issue 1, May 2011
fields of various data types. The fields are Employee Number, Employee Id, Employee Last name, Employee First name, Employee Middle name, Employee Birthday, Employee Gender, Employee Status, Employee Job, Employee Address, Employee Telephone, Employee Mobile, Employee Email and few custom fields. Since this space is short to displace the entire table, the screen shots have been divided into parts. end database, it was required to install a virtual PHP kernel on the Windows operating system. To explain it in more simple terms, PHP is a Linux based programming language which helps in connecting database as well as design user interface. Since the host server was built Windows operating system, the implementation of a PHP based application on this operating system was a challenge. Hence a virtual Linux system was installed called as Apache and then the HRIS was implemented. Figure 19 Database View 2 Figure 23 Database View 4 of leave application Figure 20 Database View 3 Figure 21 Database View 4 of leave application Front end design acts as the interface between the user and the information system. The front end would consist of user friendly information, forms, button etc. It was designed using HTML and partially with PHP. The front end is been linked with a simple web address which is used to access this application over local servers. All the data is fed or retrieved using the front end. But the process of storage and retrieval takes place with the help of database which is defined as the back end process. The database has been designed using MySQL open source. Figure 24 Database View 4 of leave application 6. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 6.1 Time Study The following data was collected when the existing HRIS (Excel) was used for Employee data transaction. (All figures displayed have approximate readings) Table 1 Information collected during time study of existing HRIS Activity Time Taken (in seconds) Creating New Employee Record 480 Retrieving Employee Data 180 Checking Leave Status 300 Update Employee Information 360 Figure 22 Database View 4 of leave application The HRIS implementation was done on the server with windows operating system running on it. Since the front end has been designed in PHP with SQL as back Figure 25 Graph depicting time study of existing HRIS SASTECH Journal 57 Volume 10, Issue 1, May 2011
Table 2 Information collected during time study of implemented HRIS Activity Time Taken (in seconds) Creating New Employee Record 270 Retrieving Employee Data 60 Checking Leave Status 170 Update Employee Information 150 After implementing the developed HRIS, another time study was made and the differences in time taken were analysed. (All figures displayed have approximate readings) v Figure 26 Graph depicting time study of implemented HRIS A comparative study was made and the results were obtained as shown in Fig. 27. Figure 27 Graph depicting comparative time study of two HRIS It was found that a 49.24% of time was reduced which was caused due to manual operations. 7. SUMMARY During the completion of this study, various stages of system development life cycle were executed. Understanding the problem statement, literature survey, analysis, interpretation, design and implementation gave the thorough idea of a study lifecycle. The objective behind designing of a new HRIS was to eliminate manual work to some extent and also help employees to access their own HRIS. A time study was made to analyse how much time was taken by an HR employee to feed in, retrieve and process employee related data in excel compared to the developed system. It was found that a 49.24% of time was reduced which was caused due to manual operations. This study can be further extended in implementation of other modules of HRIS like recruitment and selection, training and development, compensation, benefits and payroll 8. REFERENCES [1] Becker, B. B., & Huselid, M. A. (1999). Overview: Strategic HR Management in five leading firms. HR Management, 38(4), 287-301. [2] Broderick, R., & Boudreau, J.W. (1992). HR Management, information technology, and the competitive edge. Academy of Management Executive, 6(2), 7-17. [3] DeSanctis, G. (1986). HR information systems: A current assessment. MIS Quarterly, 10(1), 15-27. [4] E.W.T Nagai and F.K.T Wat, HR information systems: a review and empirical analysis Volume: 35, July 2004, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.2 [5] Eric Beulen, The contribution of HR Information System to staff retention in emerging markets, Volume:22, No. 3, pp. 270-288, April 2009, Emerald4 Group Publishing Limited. [6] Gijs Houtzagers. (1998). Business models for the HR Management discipline, MCB University Press, Vol. 6 No. 7, 1998, pp. 187-196. [7] Glenn Davidson (2005), Why HR outsourcing continues to expand, HR Management International Digest, VOL. 13 NO. 3 2005, pp. 3-5, [8] Groe, G., Pyle, W., & Jamrog, J. (1996). Information technology and HR. HR Planning, 19(1), 56-61. [9] Kenneth C.Laudon, Jane P.Laudon, Management Information Systems Managing the Digital Firm, Prentice-Hall India, Ninth Edition [10] Kirstie S. Ball, The use of HR Information System: a survey, Volume 30, No. 6, November 2000, pp 677 693, Emerald Group Publishing Limited3. [11] Michael J. Kavanagh and Mohan Thite, HR Information System, Sage South Asia Edition, Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2009.1 [12] Robert Schultheis and Mary Sumner, Management Information Systems -The Manager s View, Tata McGraw-Hill, 1999, Fourth Edition SASTECH Journal 58 Volume 10, Issue 1, May 2011