Lawson Absence Mgmt Implementation Case Study

Project:  Time Accrual to Absence Management Migration
Industry:  Retail

Business Challenges:
Our retail client utilized Lawson Time Accrual for many years and issues were arising due to Time Accrual’s limited capabilities.  Therefore, they decided to upgrade to Absence Management.  As an employer with multiple unions, one of the biggest challenges was to bring Union Human Resources into the fold.  The union contracts needed interpretation and buy-in from multiple groups and every union had different rules and policies.  Due to the complicated structure of the client, we could not use most of the Absence Management upgrade programs and had to build all plans, structures, and rules from scratch.

High Level Business Solution:
Gather all requirements from the various stakeholders including multiple union groups.  Design new Absence Management plans, structures, and rules to meet the clients needs significantly better than under Time Accrual. The stakeholders sign off on the designs and then build all the plans and structures from scratch, while training the HRIS client staff in all aspects of Absence Management.  Test the system multiple times with actual time records to run parallels of production and train client staff in how to troubleshoot Absence Management issues.  Define rules for how all Employee Absence Plan Master screen (LP31) dates needed to be loaded.  Train the payroll team in Absence Management operations and payroll processing.

Business/Technical Solution Details:
• Analyzed Time Accrual setup.
• Interviewed client Time Accrual computation and adjustment expert to fully understand all of the tasks that she did and why she had to make those adjustments. Designed Absence Management solutions to meet those needs and eliminated 90% of the manual processing. The remaining 10% is based on special cases that must be performed manually.
• Interviewed client union Payroll staff to understand and document the union policies and rules.
• Reviewed union contracts, interviewed client union Human Resources staff to further understand and document union policies and procedures and got them to commit to hard and fast rules and policies.
• Designed Absence Management plans and structures to meet the clients needs. The plans, structures, and rules fixed nearly all of the calculation issues that the client had under Time Accrual. The only things that could not be automated were those things that needed to be decided on a case by case basis and for which no rules could be defined. This significantly reduced the manual effort required by the client person who formerly spent all of her time (40 hours per week) manually adjusting employee vacation and personal plan balances under Time Accrual.
• Documented plan, structure, and rule configuration.
• Documented plan setup in plain English for client payroll and HR staff to understand and sign off to confirm that the Absence Management structures were configured to meet the policies.
• Modified plans, structures, and rules multiple times to meet changing requirements.
• Defined many new employee groups for Absence Management processing.
• Trained client HRIS staff in Absence Management setup, operations, and payroll processing.
• Trained client Payroll staff in Absence Management operations and payroll processing.
• Defined job stream including four (4) Absence Management Calculations (LP140s) and closes (LP197s) for each weekly payroll cycle. 1) process and post manual adjustments; 2) process and post vacation and personal time usage; 3) process vacation and personal time carryover and limits; and 4) process accruals and allotments.
• Worked with technical team to modify check and direct deposit receipt programs to pull Absence Management employee vacation and personal time balances from the Payment Print (PR160) pmtout laser print file.
• Worked with technical team to define automated batch job schedule under Absence Management.
• Trained and assisted client HRIS staff in how to convert employee service history (worked hours).
• Assisted and trained client staff in writing Absence Management test scripts.
• Authored Absence Management test plan.
• Unit tested Absence Management setup multiple times.
• Parallel tested Absence Management with actual time records for multiple pay periods.
• Trained client HRIS staff in how to troubleshoot Absence Management issues.
• Trained client HRIS staff in how to purge employee Absence Management data.
• Trained client staff in the use of the Absence Plan Payout program (LP130) and wrote up the pros and cons of the using the program from the clients perspective. Client management decided to use the program but not roll it out immediately.
• Since the Lawson upgrade programs wouldn’t work as we needed them to, trained client HRIS staff in how to extract vacation and personal plan balances from Time Accrual with MSAccess and how to load them into Absence Management with Manual Transaction Conversion (LP570).
• Trained client HRIS staff about how Employee Absence Plan Master (LP31) dates work to achieve the correct computations for manual overrides (special cases). Created document to standardize how to compute the proper dates for every employee in every Absence Management structure.
• Assisted client HRIS staff with uploading Employee Absence Plan Master (LP31) dates for all employees via MS add-ins.
• Developed training materials for multiple user groups including store employee reps, Human Resources staff, Payroll staff, and HRIS staff. Conducted multiple training sessions from one-on-one to large groups.
• Documented go live steps and created a go live checklist.