BrightHouse adopts cloud technology to improve employee case management

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: BrightHouse adopts cloud technology to improve employee case management.

BrightHouse, the UK weekly payment retailer, is using cloud technology, ER Tracker, from Software Europe, to manage employee relations cases, like absence, performance, grievance and conduct. The cloud software is allowing the retailer to centralise its employee relations HR function, simplify case reporting and support its employee relations strategy with the identification of case trends.

With over 300 stores in the UK and around 3,300 employees, BrightHouse's HR team has a challenging task of managing its employee relations cases. It has numerous concurrent open cases and its employee relations advisors need to access and report on these cases at any given time. Replacing its former Excel spreadsheet system, ER Tracker is rapidly speeding up the task of updating and reporting of employee relations' cases on a weekly basis from four hours to under 30 minutes.

Louise Levy, Employee Relations Manager, BrightHouse, says, "Managing cases with Excel spreadsheets was clumsy and time consuming. With numerous concurrent employee relations cases, updating and reporting became an arduous task. The new software – tailored to our specific case requirements – has helped our small team of an employee relations manager and three employee relations advisors to deal more efficiently with existing and new cases. Each stage of an employee's case is clearly identifiable and reminders can be used to flag when the next stage of a case needs to be dealt with. The cloud-based system can be accessed and updated easily by any member of the team.

The reporting capability of ER Tracker helps us to adhere to agreed SLA's set by HR and most importantly, it gives us insight into specific trends of case types in sectors of our business. For example, by identifying trends in sickness, we are able to feed this information back to the senior management team, which will support their strategic decisions for the company."

The cloud based ER Tracker is integrated with the existing HR and payroll system which enables the identification of trends on employee relations case types.

Louise adds, "The system is highly specialised and tailored specifically for BrightHouse, so our team can input a specific case with its case type of our choosing. It is a cost effective option that has changed the working practices of our team and added huge value to enable better management and analysis of patterns in our employee relations cases."