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Labatt Brewing Company Ltd.

Human Resources—Global Employee Performance Management System
Toronto, Ontario

Labatt Brewing Company knows that effective, timely employee performance management is critical to business success. It allows companies to funnel the right human resources to the right areas at the right time. It’s also crucial to ensuring employee satisfaction by positioning people for success and rewarding a job well done. However, executing a sound employee performance management system for about 1600 salaried employees worldwide is not without its challenges.

The Challenge
Labatt’s existing performance reporting system consisted of an MS Word document passed from employee to manager to final reviewer as an email attachment. The document moved back and forth between the various parties, with the final report printed and physically signed by all involved. The entire process took as much as six months to complete. The HR Group at Labatt had little if any control over the process, other than sending out reminders of the start date of the process and follow-up reminders for outstanding reports. What’s more, HR had to field questions from employees, managers and executives on the whereabouts of specific reports, by manually tracing a report’s status.

With personnel spread across the country and reporting lines also spanning these regions, the physical movement of reports for signatures proved not only cumbersome, but time consuming and difficult to trace. More importantly, the data was not in a format that could be easily used within the HR Information System, requiring information to be keyed in manually, once reports were finally complete and returned.

Cleary what was needed was end-to-end full automation of the system, easy to roll out, simple to use, with a sophisticated data structure to capture all necessary fields in both French and English. What’s more, instant tracking of reports was crucial. That’s what Powered Logic™ delivered.

The Solution
Powered Logic™ proposed an online global employee performance management system to replace the MS Word document, with forwarding between parties done automatically via email notification. HR would run the system from an administrative console allowing complete control of all data within the system. Also key, the system captured records of each and every movement of reports, making tracing and tracking virtually automatic.

The administrator could issue, amend or delete password access, amend help functions within the report form, issue special authorities, download data for the database, search the database and reset the status of any report. All changes and amendments initiated by the administrator would be completed in real time.

The process for putting the system in place had to accommodate the many nuances of Labatt’s reporting structure, including the fact that the parent company was located in Belgium. Working from the basic design and functionality laid out during initial planning sessions, the plan was re-crafted, added to and amended as the implementation process proceeded. A sign-off and audit procedure was carried out at each step of the way to ensure complete customer satisfaction. All told, planning, design and implementation took approximately six months and with excellent results.

The Benefits
Immediate benefits to Labatt are full control of their new global system, including the movement of all information. Internal acceptance of electronic signatures has expedited exponentially report processing and subsequent access to strategic human resources planning data. Each year an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 man-hours are saved over the two reporting cycles (interim and final reviews). Instead of (how many individuals devoting how many hours per week), now one administrator can manage the system over an average of one to two hour per week for all 1,600 employees reports. Finally, with all information captured in a single database, reports of any type can be done quickly and easily to guide key HR strategy decisions.