North Highland Accelerates Employee Onboarding with SharePoint

Challenge

Coming out of the economic downturn, North Highland saw signs in the second half of 2009 that their business was going to quickly pick up. Where they had historically on-boarded 50-60 affiliates during a typical quarter, current sales logs were forecasting staffing up to 200 contractors over a 90-day period – and potentially crippling their revenue management department where contractor management is performed.

Already a SharePoint-centric shop, they turned to Abel Solutions for help in improving the efficiency of their contractor on-boarding system where the current process consumed five days and relied on help from 8-10 employees across the organization.

Solution

A more robust workflow would easily resolve their issue but North Highland didn’t have time for custom development. Recognizing that with their existing SharePoint investment they would be able to quickly recover the cost of investing in a workflow development application, Abel Solutions recommended the purchase of Nintex Workflow 2007 instead of custom development to help accelerate the solution deployment.

Using Nintex, Abel Solutions helped North Highland create workflows that integrated with their ChangePoint project staffing tool, Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange for setting up new user accounts as well as their HEAT ticketing system for requisitioning equipment.

Results

Now when an account manager makes a hiring request, a workflow is initiated, tasks are created, alerts are pushed to their mobile device and progress is tracked for each person involved. The on-boarding process has been reduced from 4-5 days to just 4-5 hours

“The contractor on-boarding system has increased everybody’s throughput,” explains Allen Brewer, IS Business Strategy for North Highland. “We’re still touching the same number of people but it is the way they have to interact that has greatly improved their efficiency.”

Previously, users had to receive an email to know the status but now they can visit a dashboard to see what is happening with certain team members given override authority on steps to keep the processing moving. A KPI for NH’s account mgmt team is how quickly they can process requests.

“When account teams request staff at 4pm on Thursday for a Monday assignment, tasks need to completed quickly so we gave revenue management the autonomy to hurry things along,” continues Brewer.