How DCD Group Streamlined the Employment Process with Laserfiche Forms
Contributed by: Dawie Marais, General Manager Support Services, DCD Group
DCD Group comprises four main divisions: rail, mining and energy, marine, and defense. The majority of the DCD Group’s workforce comprises of temporary contractors, which is largely determined by the size of the contracts. Here is how DCD Group’s marine division is using Laserfiche Forms and Workflow to reduce the time it takes to onboard a temporary contractor by fifty percent.
The legacy HR process
The number of employees at DCD Group can jump from 300 to 2,500 over a short period, putting a huge pressure on the human resources (HR) department. In most cases, these contracts last 90 days and the manning up to the required capacity happens over 5 – 10 days. A contract employee may be hired up to four times during the financial year. During the contract period, the requirements change daily depending on the specific skills required at the stage of the project.
Here is what the process in the ship repair environment was like before the Laserfiche implementation.
- A foreman will identify a requirement for a new employee on a project and get approval from the project manager.
- The foreman drives to the labor office and drops off his labor requisition with the HR department.
- The HR department calls the prospective employee and asks him to drive to the office.
- When the individual arrives, he fills out three different sets of documents, each one basically asking for the same information.
- These documents are emailed to the different departments who all recapture this information into the various systems of which the Scubed human capital management system is one.
- Two copies of the employment contract are printed. The individual must sign everything before being cleared to proceed to the medical and safety departments.
The current HR process
Laserfiche Forms working in conjunction with Laserfiche Workflow has simplified this process significantly.
- Labor requisitions are no longer physically dropped off at the HR department.
- After arriving at the HR office, the applicant sits down at a computer terminal and enters all of his personal information into the following Laserfiche Form.
- As soon as the form is submitted, a copy is converted into Tiff and stored in the Laserfiche repository.
- Laserfiche Workflow monitors the folder where the forms are stored. As soon as there is a new submission, Workflow opens the form and converts the data entered into the form fields into tokens with the “Retrieve Laserfiche Form Content” activity.
- This data is then used within the “Insert Data” activity to populate the “Employee Details” table in the external SQL Marine database.
- A new template is added to the existing form and populated with the information from the employee database.
- Workflow then creates a new copy of a PDF contract, payroll and HR input forms and populates all three of them with information obtained from the original Laserfiche form. Here is what the contract creation branch of the workflow looks like:
- All of this is done instantly behind the scenes, so that when the job applicant leaves the workstation, the pre-populated contract is printed and ready to be signed.
- The job applicant signs the contract with the Nashua Green Print GPS pen. The individual keeps the printed copy of the contract, and when the HR representative docks the pen, the signature is automatically copied onto the electronic version of the contract in the appropriate location.
- Laserfiche Workflow automatically files the contract in the individual’s folder in the Laserfiche repository. If the folder doesn’t exist, it is created.
The Laserfiche – Scubed integration
In DCD Group’s HR department, Laserfiche is integrated with the Scubed human capital management system. When within Scubed, an HR employee can click on an employee’s name and the associated folder is automatically opened in Laserfiche Web Access.
Laserfiche has been set up to use Windows Authentication so that employees do not need to remember yet another user name and password when logging in.
Benefits of Laserfiche
Implementing Laserfiche in the HR department at DCD Group has resulted in the following benefits:
- Time to onboard a new employee was reduced from 45 minutes to 15 minutes.
- All employee files are now centrally located and multiple copies of the same document no longer need to be printed.
- Employee files can be accessed directly within the Scubed human capital management system with Laserfiche Web Access.
- Administrative work to onboard a new employee was cut by 50%.
