Visual WebGui Showcases

“The Visual WebGui development process was extremely productive and eliminated much of the complexity required to deliver a highly functional UI using ASP.Net” Mitch Stephens HR TMS Product Architect

Overview
HR TMS provides enterprise talent management solutions for healthcare, retail and corporate customers, focusing on performance management, compensation management and succession planning.

The competency of nurses and other healthcare worker is, of course, critical. Therefore the government, via the Joint Commission (JCAHO), tightly monitors the performance of these workers.  Accredited healthcare organizations are required to regularly review employee performance via a complex set of position dependent job descriptions and competencies. Middlesex Hospital managed their performance reviews for their 2500 employees manually via Excel spreadsheets. The manual process was labor intensive, difficult to manage and error prone. Reviews were not always where they belonged and the job descriptions and competencies for healthcare workers were difficult to keep accurate and up to date. This caused a great deal of stress when the joint commission visited and requested to see specific review documentation.

Business needs
Critical information about more than 1000 positions and their subsequent reviews needed to be readily available, not only to maintain JHACO accreditation but to effectively manage continuous improvement of employees in critical positions. With their manual Excel process, key information was irretrievably locked away in Excel® spreadsheets. And since there was no way to track review status or manage the process, reviews were often delivered late - putting the organization outside compliance with negotiated agreements.

Middlesex needed to automate their review process, pull in the position information from those spreadsheets and be able to deliver reviews online. Users needed to have online access to those reviews from a standard browser.  Although the manual system had its issues, it did have the advantage of being very comprehensive and familiar to users. The decision was made to provide a web-based solution that leveraged the look and feel of those spreadsheets in order to insure user acceptance of the system and minimize the training needed. The solution would need to provide automated workflow to route reviews to the necessary approvers and notify them by email. Job descriptions would need to be controlled centrally by HR while still allowing managers to provide input for highly technical jobs. Also, HR needed analytics from the system to support EEO and JHACO requirements, specifically compliance information so HR could easily identify, and follow-up on, late or missing reviews.

This project was a top priority of management and needed to be completed and rolled out quickly and within a limited budget.

The Solution
Using Visual WebGui, the HR TMS engineered a web-based form builder which allowed the product to create online forms that resembled the multi-tabbed review forms that employees were accustomed to. These were delivered in a robust online format, providing the clean, intuitive browser-based experience that Middlesex was looking for. 

The HR TMS team was able to accomplish this task in a fraction of time it would have taken using ASP.Net® web development methods. “The Visual WebGui development process was extremely productive and eliminated much of the complexity required to deliver a highly functional UI using ASP.Net,” said Mitch Stephens, HR TMS Product Architect. This approach was so successful that HR TMS moved the entire web component of the application to Visual WebGui, leaving the legacy .Net backend components largely unchanged.

Benefits
The solution based on Visual WebGui delivered an enhanced user experience that provides a robust, familiar, multi-tabbed performance accessible via a standard web browser. Competencies, job description, review scores and other key performance related information that was locked away in spreadsheets is now available online. Workflow and Analytics allow managers and HR to track reviews in real time and easily follow up on late or missing reviews.

In the process of delivering the solution, the job descriptions and competencies for those 1000 jobs were pulled in and stored centrally. Middlesex HR now has the ability to pass the job descriptions and competencies for specific jobs to appropriate managers. Managers can suggest changes and submit them to HR online. This way, HR can gather needed technical information from managers, but still have total control the job description repository that feeds the performance review process.
The new web based solution delivered vast overall improvements in productivity and user experience. With the former solution, late review caused additional paper work and premium payments while with the HR TMS productivity was enhanced and the time spent by managers, employees and HR was reduced by 30%.

"The product is easy to use. The forms are simple and are understandable. We’ve been able to customize it to our business practice. TMS personnel are extremely knowledgeable about Human Resource practice. They were able to take the day to day processes and apply it to the Performance Evaluation system. We didn’t need to change our practice to fit the system." Cindy Parker Manager HRIS/Payroll, Middlesex Hospital

In addition to those improvements, administrative users can still continue using the current backend and administration tools, unchanged, contributing even more to productivity since there was no additional learning curve.

Screen shots

 
HR TMS Performance Home Page

 
Multi-tabbed online Performance Review

Easy to use Analytics with Drill Down