Each week without fail, Calgary’s Louise Wilson logs onto her company’s Intranet site. Once in ‘K World’, she dutifully types in details of the latest project she’s working on.
It’s a procedure repeated thousands of times over at KPMG Consulting Inc., a leading worldwide management firm of more than 9,000 professionals, including 1,000 in five Canadian cities.
The idea, says Wilson, is for management to be acutely aware of its staff’s status. It’s not a Big Brother tool, but a method of determining which KPMG specialists are available for upcoming projects.
She calls the practice an “e-workforce solution” — one of dozens of ways to use Web technology to help companies save money, streamline communication and improve services for its employees and customers.
“It’s the newest and least understood solution, but the benefits of maximizing the capabilities of Web technology are numerous,” says the management consultant, whose company sells e-workforce solutions to other companies.
Currently, Wilson is working on a 15-member KPMG team offering “E3 Solutions” to the oil and gas sector. The team provides technology and management solutions to help companies become more effective in the areas of e-partnerships, e-customers and the e-workforce.
Using a foundation based on technology designed by Cisco Systems, a partner and 10-per-cent shareholder of KPMG, consultants offer ways for companies to streamline their systems.
An example, says Wilson, is that of retailers selling products online through their Web sites. Often when the order is placed, it ends up being e-mailed to a salesperson who must re-enter the data and send it along to the warehouse or production department.
KPMG shows companies, with the use of Cisco products or through other leading-edge firms, how to integrate their entire system and bypass the salesperson or other intermediaries.
The same is true with e-workforce solutions. An employee, for example, can go online, call up his or her personalized benefits and, with the click of a mouse, make changes directly through the benefits provider (similar to online banking.)
“It eliminates a lot of the manual transaction-type work that HR departments have to do,” says Wilson. “It then allows HR people to become strategic partners because they’re not processing people.”
As technology grows, so do solutions. A few examples of Web-enabled applications include:
* Live townhall addresses to 100,000 employees from the CEO via streaming media;
* Instant access to T-4 information online, reviews of pay stubs and up-to-date information on vacation time and sick days.
* Managers, in real time, can view the status of projects and budgets on a daily basis, ending the wait for monthly reports distributed on paper.
* Managers can see vacation schedules for entire staff at one time, eliminating endless hours of tracking down employees. It also allows managers to project budgets during key vacation periods.
Cisco, for example, has shown solid cost-benefits after establishing its own e-workforce system in the late ’90s. It has doubled its staff in that time, but its HR costs haven’t risen, says Wilson.
Large, geographically-dispersed companies stand to benefit greatly. On the flip side, small companies can win as well.
“A dot-com that’s starting up and wants to be a virtual company would probably want to use these solutions from the get go, even if they only have 20 employees, because they don’t want to hire an HR department.”
On the other hand, bricks-and-mortar companies that have two offices in one city and a good network system might not find the economies of scale beneficial.
KPMG Consulting, which had an Initial Public Offering on the Nasdaq (KCIN–NASDAQ) earlier this month and is now a separate entity from its accounting parent, is itself a test case in the e-workforce process. As KPMG amalgamates its operations worldwide, it continues to use technology to enhance its own systems.
E-learning via the Web is a favourite for Wilson.
“We are trained online,” she says. Although she acknowledges that perhaps it’s not as much fun as going to a three-day conference, online learning is much cheaper and offers greater depth of instruction.
In ‘K World’, KPMG employees have access to thousands of courses, many through the Harvard Business School.
Wilson is now taking an Internet course, a 60-hour component that includes online instruction supplemented by a mailout of books, other literature and CD-Roms. She works on her own time.
“At a three-day conference you would get 24 hours of instruction where you are just skimming the surface,” she explains.
Web publishing — putting policies, practices, procedures, company information service and directories online — is another important component.
Companies are showing great innovation using the Web. Wilson points to BP Amoco, which uses an in-house program called Connect that encourages employees to create their own home pages.
“It’s kind of a fun thing to give an employee an identity in a large organization,” says Wilson. The system also has a strong search engine allowing its 100,000 employees around the world to search out counterparts with similar job skills, projects or even hobbies.
“Connections are hugely important for people to do their jobs better,” she says.
“That’s what this technology does.”
