Shared Human Resources in the Azores Archipelago
The Regional Government of the Azores is the executive body of the Autonomous Region of the Azores and the highest body of the Autonomous Regional Administration. The Regional Government has its own executive power and its main responsibilities are managing the region’s assets, the tax revenues and expenses, adapting the national fiscal policy to the region’s reality or participate in the preparation of national plans, among others.
The Integrated Human Resources Management System of the Regional Administration of the Azores (SIGRHARA) manages all processes related to HR of the nine islands that make up the Azores archipelago. In total, it manages 17,828 workers from different agencies of the Regional Government.
Challenge
Given the geographical distance between the different islands, the necessity of repeating proceedings in each of them and following the national legislation as well as their specific rulings, the Regional Government had a lack in the management of the region’s Public Function workers.
They needed a redesign and to automate the processes, as there were several different computer applications, no centralized information available in real time and some resources allocated to inefficient tasks. Therefore, the main objective of the project was to focus on the automation and alteration of the existing human resources management processes to ensure an integrated perspective of the available information, the accuracy of the available data, the increase in productivity and the improvement keep going.
Solution
To respond to the needs mentioned above, we developed a single application for managing people. The Integrated Human Resources Management System of the Regional Administration of the Azores (SIGRHARA) manages all processes related to HR of the nine islands that make up the Azores archipelago. In total, it manages 17,828 workers from different agencies of the Regional Government. In the case of a Government of an autonomous region, there is a need to represent a complex hierarchical structure in the information system, as well as the existing dependency between these organisms. Initially, the centralization of information related to personal and professional data of all workers in the different agencies was processed in a single central database.
Results
The design of a system fully tailored to the needs of personnel management in the Regional Government of the Azores allowed to:
- Centralize information about all workers regardless of the type of legal relationship with public employment.
- Implement shared services and centralized payroll processing.
- Estimated savings of one million euros in expenses with computer software and developments after implementation.
- Reduction in 30 days of the time lag between the information processed and the impact on maturity, on services without autonomy.
- Standardization of administrative and accounting procedures and application of legislation.
- Automatic and permanent data update.
- Interoperability with other systems.
- Elimination of redundancy in procedures.
- Reduction of costs with personnel and time spent on processes.
- Extract KPI’s and other management indicators.
- Create information reports.
- Decision making with reliable and updated data.
- Better budget management and cost planning.
- Develop strategic human resources policies for the development of the Azores region.
- Dematerialization and automation of processes.
- Integrate legislative changes in a short space of time.
The use of the application, replacing the previous 150 IT applications for personnel registration and payroll processing, resulted in a substantial reduction in public expenditure of approximately one million euros, at the level of licenses, computer hardware, development of applications, among others, of considerable impact in the current economic situation.
Victor Santos, Regional Director of the Organization and Public Administration