Personnel Database

Our largest project to date was to develop a method to store personnel and training details for a rapidly growing company with over 600 staff.

The personnel side of the system was relatively straight forward but included extremely useful functionality including:

• updating Microsoft Exchange with personnel details so that info such as telephone extension, job title, department could be accessed from the address list within Microsoft Outlook (see below)

• allowing certain staff to run queries on the database (using our own bespoke query generator) to create lists of staff for mail merge documents

• printing ID cards using a card printer.  These ID cards displayed safety critical competencies and expiry dates on the back so that staff didn't need to carry up to 30 separate ID cards

• accessing photos from a network location rather than storing them in the database so that they could be accessed by staff for other purposes, e.g. newsletters, ID cards issued by external agencies

A large part of the project involved working with the Personnel, Training and Payroll departments to establish a system so that everybody was aware of new starters.  This project gave them the opportunity to think about and change some of their own processes.  Because the company grew so fast this was the first chance they had to sit down and consider their own existing procedures.

The training part of the system had over 10,000 records in the training completed section alone.  The system was developed so that the training information was input using a training plan form.  This information was then used to inform the trainee of date, location, etc of the course, it was transferred to the completed training upon completion, was used to calculate how much training grant the company was entitled to, and summarised costing information was also passed on to Management Accounting.

The system was also developed further for the Personnel department to calculate pay rises & bonuses, group this information so that each line manager was issued with pay information for their own staff.  This was then amended/confirmed as necessary and handed back to Personnel who could then update the pay details which were then forwarded to Payroll for manual input (it was decided not to automate this section as Payroll were much happier doing this once a year rather than relying on automation).

  e - matt@bellinfotech.co.uk    t - 07876 033055 / 01228 510337

  Matt Bell trading as Bell Info Tech.