| Number of employees |
| 1200 |
| Business Sector |
| Automotive |
| Location |
| West Midlands, Tyne & Wear and Gwent |
| Product Used |
| Open Options |
| - Time and Attendance |
By installing Open Options software, leading manufacturer of automotive components, TRW, recently completed the trouble-free transfer of its Time and Attendance monitoring system from an AS/400 to a Windows NT network. Installed in two locations, TRW has already seen the benefits this Client/Server system can provide in both time and money savings, through more accurate and flexible monitoring, and less administration.
A global technology, manufacturing and service company, TRW Inc. supplies a diverse range of products and services to the automotive, aerospace and information systems markets. Employing 135,000 people worldwide, this multi-national company is a leader in automotive occupant safety systems. The UK locations at Wednesbury, West Midlands and Washington, Tyne & Wear, are the inlet and exhaust valve manufacturing arm of TRW Automotive Systems, part of a group comprising eight European locations.
Ease of use...a priority
Following an initiative led by the States, the UK needed to standardise its financial and manufacturing systems, resulting in the move away from AS/400 to the more functional Enterprise SAP/R3 running on a Windows NT platform with Oracle database. What mainly appealed to us about the Crown software was its Windows-operated functionality, usability and seamless integration with other packages, recalls Jim Boot, IT Controller at Wednesbury. Having operated time and attendance for nine years we were familiar with the shortcomings of our AS/400 software and benefits to be gained by the more flexible Client/Server solution.
Top of our list of must haves’ was year 2000 compliance, followed by a secure system which allowed delegation of daily administration away from the payroll and IT departments to area supervisors. Ease-of-use was also a priority to ensure smooth implementation and on-going confidence in daily administration.
Integrates with payroll
Open Options was initially installed in February 1999 at TRW’s Washington plant to monitor 250 employees. This was quickly followed by another system to monitor 380 employees at Wednesbury in May 1999.
Open Options integrates into our payroll system and allows us to allocate access to specific functions. Any supervisor can now add a clock transaction, register absence, authorise overtime and maintain the daily work patterns of their employees, taking ownership of data for their own teams.
This eliminates the manual effort previously required by team supervisors, and the Finance Department each week, to check clocking sheets. Now exceptions are entered on a daily basis, updating payroll automatically and ensuring more accurate payments. As a result, wages queries have been reduced from about 20 per week to virtually zero.
The ability to allocate more shift patterns, 90 compared to 22 previously, ensures that overtime payments are also more accurate as Open Options allows TRW to configure many types of payments, as per sets of pre-defined payment rules.
Improved Morale
The ability to provide employees with weekly clockcards has improved morale, as it allows hours to be checked before wages are finalised. What they see on their clockcard is what they get paid, notes Bernice Fletcher, HR Training Officer. Each card also shows individual’s holiday entitlement, amount taken, days booked and remaining, plus any absences with a code to distinguish type. This was always a big issue before, with employees being referred to Finance for a manual printout.
The ability to program any number of absence descriptions has enabled HR department to provide a better analysis and saved three hours every Monday, inputting details manually.
Staff like the system
We did not believe that Open Options could do so much in so little time, recalls Bernice. Staff like the system and management are happy because they have not seen a stream of people querying their wages. Apart from the greater efficiency and cost savings provided by Open Options, supervisors are now spending their time more productively by looking after products and people rather than on administration.
Excellent implementation and set-up service was provided by Crown, sums up Jim Boot. As we got used to the system we applied more options to widen the scope of functions available. We knew what we wanted out of a system and the window-based Open Options software was ideal and worked well.
