June 2007

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Empower business booms for MIS in the west

West Australian enterprise software specialist Management Information Systems is winning major businesses over to the benefits of Empower-HR.

Resource sector labour hire company Brunel Australia, seafood supplier Kailis Bros and disability support organisation Rocky Bay are among the WA organisations that have recently selected Empower-HR to manage their people.

Management Information Systems (WA) General Manager Chris Wallace said the strong West Australian economy was creating a lot of demand. “Many businesses are growing rapidly, so they need the best people management system,” he said.

“In such a tight labour market, it is critical that you manage your people well. Businesses need to look after employees beyond simply financial compensation – it’s their perception of the value you place on them and recognition of their individual contributions to the organisation.

“To attract and retain employees requires an investment in the professional development of personnel through creating a corporate culture that engenders fairness, caring and recognises employees’ contributions. While the corporate culture provides the warm and fuzzies, organisations require good management systems to rise above the day-to-day operational processes of personnel management.

“Managers like Empower-HR because it makes their lives easier. Empower-HR is an active HR system, which puts it head and shoulders above passive systems that simply store HR data. Empower-HR turns that data into valuable information to assist managers in driving their business.

“Empower-HR can be educated about the issues important to your business, becoming an active member of your HR team, and automatically advising you when an action needs to be performed. Whether it is monitoring your key performance indicators, contract or skill expiry, or a broad range of other events, with Empower-HR you can simply set and forget – Empower-HR will let you know when some action is required.”

Management Information Systems (MIS) is a Perth-based company with 10 staff that sells Australian-developed enterprise software, including Empower-HR, develops its own software and delivers maintenance services for its customers.
Three recent successes demonstrate the diverse application and flexibility of Empower-HR.

Brunel Australia provides recruitment services to customers in the international oil & gas, petrochemical, power generation and construction industries. The company employs more than 1600 people, including subcontractors, throughout South East Asia. Its Australian workforce of 400 is going live with Empower-HR in July, with New Zealand and other parts of South East Asia following.

Kailis Bros is one of Australia’s largest and most awarded family-owned seafood and food organisations. With more than 550 employees in the peak season, the Perth-based company has a Melbourne office and an extensive network of national and international affiliations.

Rocky Bay, formerly the Western Australian Society for Crippled Children, employs about 350 people to provide care and support for people with disabilities, such as muscular dystrophy, muscular atrophy, spina bifida, cerebral palsy and those with an acquired brain injury.

Rocky Bay received the Empower-HR software as a pro bono donation, joining Perth’s Institute for Child Heath Research (which has used the software for more than six years) as a beneficiary of Empower Masterpay and MIS’ charters of social responsibility.

Mr. Wallace said: “MIS wins many of the opportunities it pursues with Empower-HR because of Empower-HR’s functional richness, ease of use, advanced Self-Service capabilities and market-leading facilities such as the ad-hoc Query Manager, Event Notification, web-based Organisational Charting, and KPI monitoring”.

“That combination of rich functionality gives us a compelling offering in the WA HR market.”

For more information about Empower-HR in WA, contact Chris Wallace on (08) 9221 9221 or email chrisw@miswa.com.au.

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Online payroll boom sends Empower to new data centre

Empower Masterpay has moved its core business systems to a $3 million data centre with state-of-the-art security, power and fire prevention systems after a 10-fold increase in online payroll customers.

During 2006, Empower saw a massive increase in the number of customers using its Empower-HR online payroll services after it retired the two-decade-old, mainframe-based Masterpay payroll service, As a result, its online service customers increased from 20 to more than 200 organisations.

The new data centre provides sophisticated security for the data contained by Empower’s servers, failsafe availability in the event of major disruptions and high bandwidth capacity to ensure customers had a good experience when using the Empower-HR system.

The 1000-square-metre facility incorporates biometric access and a fire suppression system that uses gas to extinguish a fire without disrupting computer equipment. In the event of a power failure, massive batteries can transition the data centre, operating at full load, to a diesel-powered generator, which can operate for as long as six days with on-site fuel. Operated by national network services company Internode, the data centre contains dual fibre-optic links to provide fully redundant connectivity.

Empower CEO Alan Greig said it was critical for the company’s success to outsource its data centre requirements. “Locating customer-facing servers in our office is not an option,” he said.

“We need to have full redundancy of our systems within a disaster recovery environment. Internode’s new facility gives us a lights-out secure data centre with all the capacity needed for our hosted services. None of the production systems that support our ASP customers are at our office – they’re all in the new data centre.
“It makes all the sense in the world to outsource our data centre requirements to an organisation with the ability to manage it for a large number of clients and then share the cost between them. You couldn’t afford to do it on your own.”

Empower provides Human Resource (HR) and payroll services for major Australian businesses such as Bendigo Bank, Sydney Turf Club, Port of Melbourne, Newcrest Mining, Thiess, Just Jeans, RM Williams, Reuters and Sun Microsystems. Its largest customer is the Tasmania State Government, which uses Empower-HR across all major departments.

Since 2002, Empower has offered its flagship Empower-HR software as either an in-house application, run on a customer’s computer, or as an online service provided by Empower –referred to as Application Service Provision (ASP) or Software as a Service (SAAS).

Mr. Greig said inquiries about Empower’s online HR/payroll service continued to grow. “I’d estimate that more than half the people we talk to are asking about an ASP-type payroll solution,” he said. “Where our systems are stored is very important to them. Customers want to know their confidential employee data is well protected in a secure centre.

“There is a huge potential for Software as a Service, so all the players are getting into it. It is highly acceptable to outsource payrolls. Years ago, outsourcing was done by TNT with armoured trucks. That entire process is now all electronically delivered by our servers and software from the Internode data centre.”

Empower Masterpay operates six HP DL380-class servers from the Internode Data Centre. It also uses a Finisar WDM (wavelength-divisional multiplexer), which allows it to manage and individually light up eight discrete communication channels down a dark fibre link provided by Internode between its data centre and Empower’s Kent Town head office.

Empower operates an HEVA 4000 Storage Area Network at both sites, replicating data across the fibre link to keep the locations synchronised. A VMware ESX server allows Empower to create and manage multiple virtual machines on a single physical server.

For more information about Empower’s online HR and Payroll service, contact Daryl Rasheed by calling on 08 8332 6988 or email daryl.rasheed@empower.com.au.

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AHRI hears how Self-Service empowers people

Successful businesses achieve their strategic goals by putting decision-making tools in the hands of people organisation-wide; Empower CEO Alan Greig told a major HR conference this month.

Mr. Greig was speaking at the AHRI National Convention, held by the Australian Human Resource Institute, at the Sydney Convention Centre on June 4-5.

Explaining the business benefits of deploying an HR system with self-service capabilities, Mr. Greig said organisations faced many challenges to manage their people successfully. “They need to do more with less when 48-hour days are just too short,” he said.

“As well as providing 24x7 service, they must retain good staff, identify underproductive employees and assist them to maintain a good life/work balance,” he said. “The key to unlocking this seemingly impossible success is to provide the right information to the right people at the right time. It should be easy to access and understand in order to reduce transaction times and lower costs.”

Mr. Greig said Empower had delivered this ability to many customers Australia-wide including Sydney Turf Club and national insurer Lumley Insurance. “Sydney Turf Club runs two of Australia’s premier sporting and entertainment venues, Rosehill Gardens and Canterbury Park,” he said.

“Its more than 800 full-time and casual employees work in areas from customer service, catering and sales & marketing to horticulture, facilities management and track & stable maintenance. Sydney Turf Club implemented Empower-HR’s Employee Self-Service module as part of a move to electronic payslips in order to save time, reduce stationery costs and lower the cost of printing and distribution.

“Employees on-site can use a touchscreen kiosk to access their records while the Sydney Turf Club website has a link to an employee login which allows its people to access their own details via the internet. At any time, they can view payslips online, enter leave requests and check personal details.

“As a result of this investment, Sydney Turf Club has achieved major time and cost savings.”

Mr. Greig said Empower’s vision was to be regarded as the leader in providing HR and payroll solutions that proactively helped managers to manage. “Our focus is to deliver information to managers before they ask for it,” he said. “Empower-HR is designed to allow organisations to define what information is relevant for workforce management and also to define what key measurement indicators apply, such as limits on accrued annual leave and sick days.

“In a nutshell, HR functionality is widely used now and is a runaway favourite to create efficiencies in business processes, eliminating the need for human interaction for tasks that are considered as essential administration. Along with strategic changes to the organisation, this frees HR specialists to play an integral part of strategic thinking, leadership and tasks.”

For more information about Empower-HR Employee Self-Service, call Alan Greig on 08 8332 6988 or email alan.greig@empower.com.au.

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