HRS will support UW–Madison employees now, into future

On April 18, the Human Resource System went live, becoming the tool that all UW System institutions use to process and manage employment, payroll and the administration of employee benefits.

The project, known as HRS, represents one of the most ambitious software implementations in the history of the state of Wisconsin, supporting an annual payroll of more than $2 billion. Just as importantly, the challenges represented by the HRS implementation were met by drawing on the unique institutional culture of the University of Wisconsin.

“Our university’s mission statement states that our organizational purpose is ‘To create, integrate, transfer and apply knowledge,’” says Bob Lavigna, director of the Office of Human Resources for UW–Madison. “Our aging legacy payroll and benefits system was no longer up to the challenge of supporting our mission. HRS, in terms of both the system itself but also in the organization that manages it, will support our mission — today and well into the future.”

An example of this is the UW Service Center, which provides operational support for HRS. While it provides UW System-wide support, the UW Service Center is physically located on the UW–Madison campus, at 21 N. Park St.

“There are obvious operational challenges in providing support from one central location to geographically dispersed institutions,” says Diane Blaskowski, the manager of support operations for the UW Service Center. “These challenges have required us to explore new processes to address them, either by using existing tools and resources in new and innovative ways or in some cases by creating something that’s entirely new.”

Some of these innovations include:

• The Job and Employee Management System, called JEMS. This system was created for UW–Madison by the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) and folds together functionality from the existing Classified Human Resources and Position Vacancy Listing systems to provide an integrated recruiting and hiring solution for HR offices in the UW Madison schools, colleges and administrative units.
• The HRS Knowledge Base. This is the repository for HRS end-user documentation. It leverages DoIT’s existing Knowledge Base tool to give the Service Center an efficient way to create, maintain and deliver up-to-date information on HRS business processes.

“Historically, the problem with paper manuals and other kinds of end-user documentation is that the information gets stale,” Blaskowski says. “What might have been true in 2005 isn’t necessarily still true in 2011. By moving this documentation into the Knowledge Base we can more effectively ensure that the administrators we serve are getting timely and accurate information.”

More information about the UW Service Center available online.