Re-inventing Human Resources


Auxiliary Reporting. Now Driven from Your Database

In a great new feature released with OrgPlus Premium (and Professional) 8.3, OrgPlus will now drive alternate and dotted-line reporting directly from your data extract.

I read a lot of HR blogs that talk about alternative reporting structures. It’s good to see that with HumanConcept’s latest release the features in the technology are keeping track with shifting business norms.

The best way to understand it is to show it in action – so here we go:

Auxiliary Reports and The Beatles

Start with a simple data file. Here we have five (famous) employees. Note the auxiliary reporting relationship defined in AuxReportsTo.

A simple import produces a chart like the one below. Note the dotted line – OrgPlus has automatically recognised the hierarchy in AuxReportsTo.

Too Easy, but potentially very useful for managing complex relationships… Time to get even more complex.

Auxiliary Reports and Matrix Organisations

The new auxiliary reporting features can be used to build almost any chart direct from your data set. An ambitious example is a matrix organisation, where employees report up to their head of department, but also report to their project head.

New to matrix organisations? Read more here.

Again we start with a data file, this one more complex. Note the AuxReportsTo column, Departments and Projects. Our matrix organisation has department leaders, project leaders, and a number of employees who report to both.

See Jim Turner for example, an IT consultant in Project Alpha he reports to both Simon Dugas (Senior Consultant) and also George Creston (Project Leader on Project Alpha).

Complex? No worries! An import, some chart rules and conditional formats later, and we have this chart which explains it all easily.

Every employee reports up and left to their managers. Your matrix is decipherable at a glance.

Does your organisation have some complex relationships? Tell us your examples below…

Or if you’re interested in seeing how our Matrix chart was made, click through to page 2.



Business Development Manager Wanted

This is a great opportunity for a results oriented sales person in the business applications space selling Enterprise Solutions to Government and Corporates to join a leading HR Technology software and services company
If you’re the person we’re looking for you will be a results oriented, persistent, self-starting achiever who knows how to sell.
If this position sounds like you then be prepared to sell yourself!
As a first instance call 03 9517 7846

This is a great opportunity for a results oriented sales person in the business applications space selling Enterprise Solutions to Government and Corporates to join a leading HR Technology software and services company based in our Melbourne office.

What we’re looking for

If you’re the person we’re looking for you will be a results oriented, persistent, self-starting achiever who knows how to sell.

You will be articulate, to the point and excellent at building rapport over the phone and in person presenting and speaking in corporate environments.

You will be a good problem solver, and be able to work unsupervised and efficiently. You will have practical understanding of corporate Information Systems and reporting concepts.

With a demonstrable record in sales, you will enjoy meeting your targets and working with others to achieve success.

Skills and attitude

* Excellent verbal, presentation and written skills

* Excellent computer skills and solid understanding of corporate IT

* Ability to prioritise leads and opportunities and appreciate business urgency

* Motivated self starter – we’ll let you get on with the job

* Ideally have tertiary qualification

If this position sounds like you then be prepared to sell yourself!

To apply, call 03 9517 7846

About Navigo

Navigo is a fast growing company providing HR Technology solutions to medium and large corporates. Our flagship solution is OrgPlus, an organisational charting and workforce planning tool. We also provide HRIS consulting and managed services.

We have a friendly and casual office environment and are looking for people who can grow with the company.



Upcoming HR Events

The Australian HR and HR tech scene is lined up to be busy for the next months with a host of major events. A short list below, if you’d like us to add others we’ve missed please email us the details.

Members of our team will be in attendance at most of these: We hope to see you there!

HR Summit 2010

28 – 30 April 2010 at the Crystal Palace, Luna Park, Sydney

Free to attend and spread across two days, delegates will see the very best speakers from Australia”s leading companies, as well as the latest products, services and technologies available from a diverse range of industry specialists.

Learn more at http://sydney.hrsummit.com.au

Higher Education HR Conference 2010

28 – 30 April 2010 at the Sofitel, Brisbane

With the title “2020 Vision” this conference is all about planning the University of the future.

Learn more at http://www.aheia.edu.au/conf_2010

AHRI National Convention 2010

10 – 11 May 2010 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Melbourne

Australia’s biggest event for HR and people managers featuring quality international and local speakers and the latest people management solutions.

Learn more at http://www.convention.ahri.com.au

CeBIT Australia 2010

24 – 26 May 2010 at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour

Not strictly HR, but a must visit for anyone on the cusp of HR and business technology, CeBIT is returning to Sydney in under a month.

Learn more at http://www.cebit.com.au/

Oracle and OrgPlus Public Training 2010

Dates throughout April, May and 2010

Our cost-effective public training sessions are now in full swing for 2010, with our first session in Adelaide kicking off next week.

Learn more about Oracle Discoverer training workshops

Learn more about OrgPlus training workshops

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The Australian HR Tech Report 2010 Now Available

report cutting

Today we released the Australian HR Tech Report 2010, the latest primary research into HR systems and technology in Australia, including the uptake and satisfaction with HRIS and HR systems, motivators and roadblocks for improvement.

We’ve conducted this research with the aim of giving a little something back to HR in Australia. Many of our customers helped us by submitting their responses to our HR tech survey – to them a huge a thank you.

The report is 40 pages long with commentary, conclusions and recommendations from Peter Forbes, our co-founder and chief HR technology expert. Analysis is divided by industry category and organisation size (in number of employees) to allow you to benchmark your HR organisation against those with similar requirements.

report thumbnailThe report is free to download, and we encourage all of our customers and followers of this blog to help themselves to a free copy and see how they compare with their peers in Australian HR.

Download your free copy of the Australian HR Tech Report 2010.

Have you read the report already?

Let us know what you thought of it in the comments below:



Navigo Moving Offices Friday 19th March

Just a quick notice to announce that we’re relocating our Melbourne office on Friday 19th March (tomorrow). We’re moving two kilometres down the road to new more spacious offices in Ringwood.

Due to the move our phone system will be diverted to our Sydney office until early next week and our technical support consultants may also be a little slow responding to emails during this time.

Rest assured things will be back to normal by early next week. If you need assistance urgently, please call your Navigo contact on their mobile, or contact Sydney and they can direct you to the best place.

Best regards from Navigo Melbourne.



Senior Technical Consultant Wanted

Another great opportunity from Navigo. This time for an experienced technical consultant who can provide practical and business focused solutions, to join our friendly and cutting-edge business solutions and services company.

The Person

We are looking for a tech consultant with loads of experience in Oracle technology to join us in our large and modern Ringwood office.

If you’re what we are looking for you will be expert in working with customers to understand and solve their business and software issues.  You will be great at discovering requirements and translating business issues and motivations into practical solutions using Oracle tools and technologies including PL/SQL, JSF, Oracle Application Server and Database Server.

Additionally you need to be pro-active, organised and multi-skilled technically: We support an application based on SQL Server and IIS, and will need you to be able to learn the ropes and work with this application. Having experience in working with HR/Payroll systems would be advantageous.

The Role

As a small company, we like our consultants to be multi-skilled so the role covers consulting, development, support and training. You will:

  • Perform professional engagements (onsite and remote) including project scoping, requirements analysis and functional specs
  • Develop solutions in PL/SQL, JSF, Oracle Reports, Oracle Discoverer
  • Perform Oracle software upgrades for Application and Database Server (10g, 11g)
  • Perform scheduled maintenance tasks for our managed services clients
  • Installation and Product consulting for OrgPlus (runs on SQL Server and IIS)

This is a great opportunity to put your diverse technical and consulting skills to work in a growing, forward-thinking organisation with a fun and stimulating environment.

How to Apply

Do NOT email your CV or Resume!

Instead, please give us a call. Phone 03 9517 7846 to leave a message on our voice mail system and tell us why you’re right for the job. We appreciate your participation, however only short-listed applicants will be contacted.

We look forward to hearing from you!



Navigo is Growing

It’s been a busy two months at Navigo to start 2010. We have some great projects on the go and I’d like to take a quick moment to share them with you.

January and February have been busy in preparation of the Navigo Australian HR Tech Report 2010. This has been a mammoth project: For those not in the know, in November and December 2009 Navigo commissioned a survey of 165 Australian enterprise-scale organisations to capture the current state of their HR technology. For the first two months of this year we have been analysing and preparing this data. The finished Australian HR Tech Report is now approaching completion and will be distributed free to every one of our contributors. We hope to spark some discussion and are already looking forward to the possibility of a follow-up report next year.

We presented our first industry webinar during February to Universities and higher-education providers around Australia and New Zealand. With over 20 Universities using OrgPlus now we took the time to highlight some great industry-specific uses for the software. The feedback we had was all positive so we look forward to preparing more industry-focused webinars in the near future.

Just finished are our exhibitions at both Mastering SAP HR and the Talent2 User Group conferences. Paulus Briels presented his new talk on practical succession planning “How to drive faster succession planning through visualisation” continuing our focus that skilled visual reporting really can enable workforce decision-making in highly effective, efficient ways.

Our team and Melbourne operation are growing! We welcome this month two new staff members into our Melbourne team, Michael Penny and Erin Allwood. In addition, next week we relocate to our new spacious offices in Ringwood. So much room presents opportunities for us to host training and OrgPlus user group meetings on our own premises, so we look forward also to exploring these opportunities later this year.

In summary, a very busy start to 2010 presenting many opportunities for the future. To all of our valued customers – as our team, capabilities, HR technology solution and service offerings all continue to grow this year we look forward to introducing you to new opportunities for your workforce decision-making – all while maintaining that quality customer service you have come to expect.

We look forward to touching base with you again soon.



Navigo tweets this week

  • Big week this week: Exhibiting at http://www.masteringsap.com/hr Novotel Manly – giving away great prizes for the winners of our OrgPlus challenge #
  • Building up for Alesco conference T2UG 2010 – Monday and Tuesday next week in Perth. Looking forward to seeing our friends in the industry #


Navigo tweets this week

  • Excited about our webinar, Higher Education: Meeting Change with Better Workforce Planning … due to start in 90 minutes! #


Creating Payroll Variance Reports with Oracle Discoverer

Overview

I have had many clients ask me whether they can create Pay Variation reports in Oracle Discoverer, and how much effort is involved. It is possible and it is quite easy once you know how.

To create Pay Variance reports in Oracle Discoverer you only need access to Discoverer Administrator, and either Discoverer Desktop or Discoverer Plus (this example will use Discoverer Desktop) and a basic knowledge of how the products work.

Pay Variance reports allow users to compare employees pay details over two different pay periods.  Not only will this allow easy reading for users but also allow the creation of calculations, conditional formatting and other Discoverer features that highlight the data users need to see.

The below image is what we will now create;

Var11 - Complete with formatting 2

Setting up the new Folder

To create a Pay Variance report in Oracle Discoverer, the first thing we need to do is setup a new folder in Discoverer Administrator.

Most clients wanting to create a Pay Variance report will already have an existing Pay folder in their End User Layer (EUL) so we will start from this point.  The below image shows the current EUL in Discoverer Administrator with the Pay folder expanded.  Our aim is to duplicate the Pay folder and join it to itself.
Var01 - Initial BA

Duplicate the Pay Folder

It is good practice to create a new business area when creating custom folders, so I have created a business area called “Human Resources – Custom”

Since we want to duplicate the Pay folder, we can simply copy it.  To do this right click on the original Pay folder and click “Copy”

Next, right click on the business area that you want to add the duplicate the folder into and choose “Paste”

Your new folder should now appear in the business area you chose.  Next, change the name of the folder to something a little more meaningful.  I tend to call these kind of folders, the name of the original folder (In this case “Pay”) with the words “Outer Join” after it.  This is because the next step is to create an outer join to the folder.

Var04 - New Folder Created

Joining the Folders

Now we will join the new folder to the original one.  Do this by clicking on the new folder and clicking;

Insert -> Join

Then choose the field you want to join your folders by, in this case Employee ID and click “OK” to go to the join wizard.

Var05 - New Join 1

Step 1 – Choose as many fields as you like to join the two folders together.  The fields to join by are employee identification fields like Employee ID and Job ID.  Don’t join by fields like Pay Period, as the point of this report to compare different pay periods, not join by them.  Once you choose the fields to join by click “Next”.

*Note – The folder on the left hand side of the screen is known as “Master” and the folder on the right hand side of the screen is known as “Detail”, this needs to be known for Step 2.

Var05 - New Join 2

Step 2 – When creating the join, it can be a good idea to create an outer join.

The difference between an outer join and a regular join is;

  • A regular join means that there must be a record in both tables to join by. If a record exists in one table but not the other, neither record will be displayed in the chart
  • An outer join means that when linking the folders together, a record must exist in the first folder, but does not need to exist in the second folder.  For example if an employee got paid in one period, but not in the second period, the employee will still exist in the Discoverer report, but the second folder’s fields will be left blank.

We will create an outer join in this example to show records from the “Pay” folder even if they don’t exist in the “Pay – Outer Join” folder.

Var05 - New Join 3

The join appears under the fields.

Var06 - Join Created

Once the new folder has been created and joined in Discoverer Administrator we can create the Pay Variance report using Discoverer Desktop.

Continue to page 2 to read this step …