Public Sector could be saving £7.34bn by taking HR admin tasks online. With an investment of £40 per employee per year technology could be a real money saver, according to Qikker Solutions.
Whilst many civil servants enjoy the benefits of the internet to do things such as their banking, holiday and travel reservations and shopping, at work they are handed a paper form to fill in to perform simple tasks such as booking holidays, doing their expenses and completing their annual appraisal.
In the public sector, and despite the present Governments eGovernment Initiative, most people related management processes are still mainly paper form based.
Apart from being environmentally unfriendly, these archaic processes are prone to data duplication and errors and very costly to support and maintain.
Mark Barlow, Managing Director, Qikker Solutions, explains: “Calculations suggest that 350,000 hours a year of wasted time and effort could be saved in an organisation with 5000 people by updating form based processes to enable basic HR admin tasks to be completed online.
“An organisation can then choose how to realise that saved time but should it elect to realise it as cost savings, 350,000 hours is the equivalent of 212 people working a 7.5hr day for 220 days a year. If you extrapolate that out for 5.771million public sector employees (Office for National Statistics – Public Sector Employment Report, Q2 2008), that represents a headcount reduction of 244,700 without affecting current levels of productivity.
“At an average annual cost of £30,000 per employee, that represents a saving of £7.34bn to the tax payer.”
The global shift towards consuming software as a service has drastically reduced the cost and time that it takes to deploy technology.
A full suite of online people management applications, including holiday planning, appraisals, absence management and compliance management costs approximately £40 per person for unlimited 24x7access.
Barlow, concluded:
“With no capital budget required, and no requirement to host, manage and support any IT hardware or infrastructure, this is all provided by the service supplier and therefore included in the annual subscription charge. So £40 per person for an organisation with 5000 people is £80,000 per year all in!
“It’s not a King’s ransom and for that you get to drive 350,000 hours of inefficiency out of the organisation. That makes the transition from paper to technology, completely self-funding.”
