HR and Quality Management in ERP System

Human Resource (HR): Though the pay rolls preparation through bespoke systems is one of the early adoptions of application software in many organizations, HR module was mostly left out by them, during their early phase of implementation of ERP system, apparently due to routine nature of HR functions, involving mostly some staffing activities. However, need of a human resource department has changed dramatically from payroll and document management to organizational management and personnel development, during the course of last decades and necessity of adoption of an ERP system evolved.

Now, the functionality of HR modules is more and more used for the management of human capital and human resources.

Some of the basic functionalities of a HR module are listed below:

1. Personnel Management: This basically comprise a common database of all personnel master data. The system, often, comprises workflow tools which assist in administering various HR functions.

   Personnel management facilitate recruitment process which involves notification of vacant jobs including job description, internal job posting, external job advertisement, matching of applicant qualification with requirement of jobs and selection of candidates.

   The travel management segment of this functionality, helps to control the process from initial travel request right through to posting of final expenditure in financial ledger. Benefit administration component provides capability and flexibility to administer employees’ participation in various benefit programmes such as health insurance, annual bonus, performance bonus, gratuity, and other compensations.

2. Personnel Management: This basically comprise a common database of all personnel master data. The system, often, comprises workflow tools which assist in administering various HR functions.

   Personnel management facilitate recruitment process which involves notification of vacant jobs including job description, internal job posting, external job advertisement, matching of applicant qualification with requirement of jobs and selection of candidates.

   The travel management segment of this functionality, helps to control the process from initial travel request right through to posting of final expenditure in financial ledger.

   Benefit administration component provides capability and flexibility to administer employees’ participation in various benefit programmes such as health insurance, annual bonus, performance bonus, gratuity, and other compensations.

3. Payroll management: The basic function of this component is to generate pay checks periodically, produce related reports and posting to relevant financial ledgers.

   Attendance records of the employees are entered in the system (often through an access control system). The system provides facility to record overtime data and generate reports involving leave, attendance and absenteeism.

4. Time Management: This component enables analysing of data related to the time spent by employees on their jobs. Management of work schedule by automating schedule generation is done by this functionality. Time management schedule also enables individual and group piecework calculation for employees’ incentive wages.

Quality Management - In every organization, raw material, work in progress and end products are regularly inspected. This is basically to ensure that nothing goes wrong during the process of procurement, production or distribution.

Thus, quality management module engages entire supply chain quality operations. As a part of logistics application, quality management module handles the traditional task of quality planning, inspection and quality control.

Quality Planning - Before a quality inspection is carried out, it is necessary to define prerequisite information of which product is needed to be inspected. The inspection of selected product is done based on some of its characteristic, of which method of inspection/ testing is to be determined in advance.

Quality inspections are not always a simple measurement of characteristics but may involve complex calculations, for which requisite algorithm is entered in the system for automatic calculation of quality score during inspection. The effect the inspection will have on the product and location where inspection is done is also entered in the system.

Inspection Process - Inspection orders may be order specific and can be created for a sales, purchase or production order. However, there may be standard inspection procedure where inspection orders are triggered both for moving products as well as products held in storage.

Standard inspection orders are automatically generated for purchase order, sales order and production order as per a pre defined quality grouping.

Quality Control - This functionality helps in determining sample sizes and adoption of Statistical Quality Control (SQC) techniques.

The controlling tools such as quality control charts, quality scores for inspection lots, are part of this process. This procedure also helps in generating quality notifications for external and internal problems and initiating corrective action. The inspection results are also archived for future analysis through this process.