Success Stories

Northern Health Uses OrgPlus® to Ensure Post-Merger HR Data Accuracy and Structural Efficiency

Northern Health delivers healthcare to more than 300,000 people in a half million square mile area in northern British Columbia, Canada. The organization is made up of more than two dozen acute care facilities, 14 long term care facilities, public health units and offices providing specialized services. Northern Health physicians performed more than 24,000 surgeries, welcomed 3,000 babies and treated nearly 255,000 emergency patients in the 2004-2005 operating year.

Northern Health was formed by merging together 40 independent healthcare facilities to provide these locations with central governance, planning and communication. The desired structure also allowed individual facilities to maintain local operating and decision-making autonomy. As a newly-formed public healthcare organization with more than 7,000 employees and an annual budget of $521 million, it had to ensure effective management of its converged workforce by instituting an efficient organizational structure.

The management of Northern Health understood that an intelligent organizational charting system would serve the company as a platform for workforce and structural planning. Key decision-makers from across the organization collaborated on a list of functional requirements for a solution. After a lengthy comparison of OrgPlus to other products, Northern Health selected OrgPlus based on overall look and feel of the user interface, the clean-looking charts for presentations and its competitive price. OrgPlus also outperformed competitive offerings in security, conditional formatting, integration with Microsoft Office and exporting capabilities to PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat.

OrgPlus' dynamic organizational charts mapped the entire hierarchy of 7,000 employees for communicating the new structure, geographical locations and reporting relationships. The new chart allowed management to view the organization as a whole, as well as by its separate business units and allocated resources. Problems with the hierarchy were easily pin-pointed and corrected in order to reflect accurate reporting relationships and budgeting needs.

As soon as OrgPlus was linked to Northern Health's Now Solutions emPath HR system, problems with the accuracy of their HR data were immediately identified. The HR department and approximately 300 department managers at various geographic locations were given secure access to edit charts, validate data and correct inaccuracies. With OrgPlus, the organizational structure now keeps pace with change. Changes are automated, eliminating the need for constant maintenance and correction by management. Problems with data or structure are easily identified and corrected in minutes in the emPath HR system.

Beyond improved data and structural accuracy, the intelligent organization charts dramatically improved communication across the organization. OrgPlus functions as a self-service directory where employees get answers quickly about reporting relationships, employee locations and contact information. Detailed profiles of each employee provide e-mails, phone numbers and addresses. The directory is linked to Microsoft Outlook allowing employees to locate the proper person to contact and e-mail them with a single click.

With the successful roll-out of OrgPlus completed, Northern Health’s human resource department is beginning to pull HR metrics from emPath into OrgPlus and is planning to perform workforce modeling, salary-rollups and other key metrics to prepare for future changes.

With OrgPlus, Northern Health has achieved effective central governance, planning and communication of its new organizational structure. Additionally within OrgPlus, it has a platform for workforce planning to help management make informed business decisions and plan change with confidence.

HumanConcepts is the leading provider of workforce modelling and intelligence solutions. With its OrgPlus technology charting millions of employees for organizations worldwide, including 400 of the Fortune 500, HumanConcepts has defined best practices in organizational charting. OrgPlus integrates with HR systems to automatically create, update and distribute organizational charts for team collaboration, workforce planning and critical decision-making. OrgPlus integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office applications.

HumanConcepts is based in California with offices in the United Kingdom and Germany and offers OrgPlus software and services worldwide. For more information visit www.orgplus.co.uk.