CGI provides HR self-service solution to Bell Canada's employees

“CGI helped us drive significant cost out of the business by creating self-serve technologies that put control into the hands of employees who are the source of information. ”

Robert Turner, Senior Director - Employee Services, Bell Canada

Bell Canada is Canada's largest supplier of telecommunications services. With one of the world’s most robust and reliable public switched networks, Bell Canada provides advanced voice, data and image communications to millions of business and residence customers across Canada.

Bell employs some 44,000 people and depends on its human resources information system to manage the storage and maintenance of employee data, the administration of benefits, the recording of time worked and vacation taken, and the production of its payroll. When Bell decided to upgrade its human resources system to better support its employees and organization, it also wanted to implement an employee self-serve component to streamline its HR system and save administration costs. It turned to CGI to make this possible.

The Challenge
The employee self-serve solution was part of a larger project by Bell to migrate its legacy HR system to the SAP HR solution. Bell was looking to provide all of its employees with a tool that would allow them to access, view and in some cases update many of their HR records, such as civil status, pay stubs, and contact information.

In addition to providing a world-class intuitive tool and a sense of empowerment to employees, Bell would improve efficiency, reduce the number of administrative calls and queries to its central HR office, and ease this group’s overall workload, thus helping to achieve the company’s financial goals.

CGI was asked to develop the self-serve solution and integrate it into Bell’s new SAP HR system. Bell called on PricewaterhouseCoopers to assist in the design of the accompanying business processes to ensure they were aligned to best industry practices.

CGI needed to ensure that the new employee self-serve tool would be completely user friendly and require absolutely no training. It would also need to have the look and feel of other Bell tools, while being completely secure. Given the volume of data processed each day and the diversity of Bell’s workforce of unionized, clerical and management employees, one of CGI’s challenges in the project involved successfully connecting its new employee self-service solution to Bell’s constantly evolving HR system and database.

Moreover, with some 45,000 desktop PCs running a variety of browsers, CGI had to ensure the new Web-based tool was accessible from as many of these stations as possible.

The Strategy
CGI drew on its deep technical and HR expertise to design and implement the employee self-serve tool. PricewaterhouseCoopers brought strong business process analysis and design skills to the project.

The project team created an employee focus group to provide input on the design, testing and ultimately end user acceptance of the new tool. These employees represented a variety of functions across the Bell organization and evaluated all of the user aspects of the employee self-service solution.

“CGI worked closely with us to understand employees’ needs and our business requirements,” stated Robert Turner, Senior Director – Employee Services, Bell Canada. “CGI helped us to establish and successfully execute a strategy that aligned with existing self-serve tools, minimized training requirements and maximized availability to employees.”

The project paralleled the larger SAP HR system implementation, which followed a multi-phased approach. The first phase covered the detailed scoping and planning of the project. Current business processes and technical environments were reviewed to understand how Bell was operating at the time.

The second phase saw the launch of the formal, detailed “to be” requirement data gathering process and the technical design process.

The third phase involved development and unit testing, integration testing, and detailed user acceptance testing. In addition, a go/no-go mechanism was introduced. This would not only ensure that the project team felt ready for the go-live, but that the business and support teams would feel equally comfortable for system start up and to begin using the new business processes.

The final go-live phase was introduced in four steps. The team decided to first implement the solution in two representative business units – Bell Nexxia and Bell ActiMedia – before proceeding with Bell Canada, Bell Mobility, Telebec and Northern Telephone in the second phase, BDI in the third phase and finishing with Bell ExpressVu.

The Technology

• SAP HR/3
• SAP Business Information Warehouse
• SAP Internet Transaction Server
• SAP Web Application Server
• Operating System: NT Server
• Oracle Database

The Results
Bell has provided its employees with a state-of-the-art application reflective of the company’s reputation for technological excellence, and employees are delighted with their new tool. For the first time, they now have access to view and maintain their employee records, and they can also see their pay stubs online in a secure, user-friendly manner.

Bell has realized substantial savings in the cost of printing and distributing paper documents to its employees, while making the same information available in a more timely and efficient manner. Bell has also seen a reduction in the number of calls to its HR office, as employees can now obtain answers to many of their administrative questions online. A year after implementation of the employee self-serve tool, many employees say they can’t believe they used to receive their pay information on a piece of paper every two weeks. A detailed history of their pay stubs is now at their fingertips.

In fact, the employee self-serve feature is now so widely used and accepted by Bell’s employees that it is part of the home page of the main Bellnet employee portal – a huge vote of confidence by the Bell organization in the importance of the solution to its employees.

“CGI helped us drive significant cost out of the business by creating self-serve technologies that put control into the hands of employees who are the source of information,” concluded Mr. Turner. “Congratulations CGI – ESS is one of the most widely used self-serve tools across the company and is visible evidence of the success of our SAP HR implementation.”

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