47 branches nationwide, 5,000 employees How the Korean Red Cross broke through the walls of a 10-year-old HR system

Which tasks used to take up the most of your time in HR?

HR work runs on similar events every year, so promotions, pay-step increases, and commendations for staff at each branch came around in the same cycle. Some of it, like performance ratings, was calculated automatically, but there were also times when the person in charge had to check the eligible years in fine detail by hand. When recommending candidates for commendations, we had to click through the personnel record tabs one by one to check each candidate's HR history. Interview reviews were the same. We used paper rating sheets, and for promotion reviews alone, if there were many candidates, we needed as many written rating sheets as there were reviewers. For attendance, too, the person in charge had to visually check start and end times or set up Excel formulas just to review clock-in and clock-out, departures and returns, and overtime. With 47 branches, dozens of staff were spending unnecessary time on administrative processing.

What led you to decide to upgrade a system you had used for over a decade?

As a public institution, we could not change the system on one person's judgment alone, and the direct trigger was removing ActiveX. We had to respond to information environment policy, and it happened that the system we built in 2014 had been in use for nearly ten years, during which laws and internal policies had changed several times. So we took that as the opportunity to upgrade the attendance, payroll, and HR programs all at once.

Among the many solutions available, what made you choose hunel again?

It was partly the result of a high score in the proposal evaluation, but from a practitioner's point of view, it helped that they were the vendor who had built our existing HR system. Because they were a partner who already knew the current system well, being walked through what would change and how in the new system was not difficult, and we understood each other quickly.

This was a project spanning 47 branches nationwide. Was there anything particularly difficult along the way?

Hospital attendance was the trickiest part. We are divided into three business areas — general operations, blood services, and hospital operations — and the hospitals were using a separate attendance program that suited the medical staff rather than our internal program. That covered three-shift workers, emergency room doctors and nurses, and clinical staff. So at first we thought, "We will have to give up on integrating attendance for the hospital sites." But the senior consultant in charge of attendance met with the hospital staff and came back with a positive answer that it could be done, and after that we visited all 7 hospitals or invited their staff in for repeated meetings. We also met directly or held calls with the staff at the other vendor that managed the hospitals' attendance program, and in the end we were able to build a structure where the attendance data entered in the hospitals' separate program is automatically reflected in our attendance system.

After the rollout, what change did you feel most in day-to-day work?

From an HQ administrator's point of view, working hours have dropped sharply — both in how we use the system and in going paperless. Over ten years of using the program, I had written down a lot of "it would be good if this changed" notes, and almost everything we asked to have reflected in the TO-BE was implemented. Specifically, here are the changes.

• Online interview review system (paperless): Not only new hiring but also promotion reviews and manager-track selection reviews moved online. Paper rating sheets are gone, scores are totaled automatically, and you can see the rating results for all interviewees at a glance.
• Electronic employment contracts: Contracts are now reviewed online and signed electronically, so the paperwork for employment contracts and various pledge forms has disappeared.
• Grievance transfer request menu: Previously, employees on leave could not apply, and when another employee entered it on their behalf, the entering employee's information was saved — so the administrator had to verify each actual grievant one by one. Now the grievant is recorded correctly, and duplicate applications from the same employee are flagged automatically.
• Out-of-office / field-work buttons: After approval, employees press the out-of-office or field-work button and press the return button when they come back, and attendance is managed from that. Before, there was only a request form, with no automated system to check departures, field work, and returns.
• Automatic overtime calculation: Enter only the start and end times, and break time is excluded automatically so the overtime hours go straight onto the request form. Before, we entered the start and end times and the working hours excluding breaks entirely by hand.
• Attendance rules tailored by business area: We are split across general, blood services, and hospital operations, and beyond standard working hours we also have flexible work, on-call duty, and shift work. The hospital sites in particular have so many types of working hours that automation was difficult. Now the system has been developed so that leave, break time, and allowance payments by hours are calculated automatically against dozens of different attendance rules across the 7 hospitals, and fed into the attendance system.
• New recruitment website: Before, our corporate website simply linked out to a recruiting site; this time we built a new recruitment website.
• Benefits request menu linked to e-HR: Applications such as personnel exchange allowances and housing deposit or monthly rent support can now be submitted with the system pulling in the dates of the relevant HR appointment.
• Improved performance rating system: Ratings are now made according to the ratios set for each number of reviewees, and the range available for upward adjustment is limited automatically. We also improved things so that manager-track employees holding concurrent posts can see the rating criteria clearly.
• Design refresh: The interface moved to a trendier mint-and-light-green tone that is easier on the eyes.

How did employees and management react to these changes?

The reviewers were especially pleased that promotion and hiring interview ratings moved online. They no longer had to fill in written ratings one person at a time, and the administrators no longer had to double-check the rating results. Above all, they were satisfied that they could now see at a glance the distribution of how they had ranked and scored all the employees. Once a review is finished, you can even check the overall distribution.

We would also like to ask about your experience with customer support and the service overall.

The feedback was very fast and they reflected things right away, so honestly I never felt much inconvenience there. From Executive Director Kim Junyoung, who oversaw the whole project, to the senior and lead consultants and the developers, they all worked extremely hard, and what stays with me is that they thought about things from our side as well, not only from the project team's perspective.

We hear it is unusual for a project like this to finish on schedule with such a high level of completion.

It was a project that put a lot of pressure on the HR team, so just finishing exactly on schedule meant a great deal. From a department with a lot of project experience, I had heard that projects rarely finish within the set timeline. I had actually expected about two months of delay myself. But it wrapped up right on the promised schedule, and at a high level of completion, so a lot of people around us were surprised. The preparation was hard work, but it has stayed with me as an enjoyable and valuable experience.

Looking back now, was there a decision you would call "a really good call"?

Consolidating the approval system into one. The original plan was to handle attendance and various request approvals inside e-HR, but we already had a separate approval system in use internally. If approvals had run inside e-HR, approvers would have had to approve documents in the original approval system and then log in to e-HR again for the e-HR-related approvals. So we asked for integration with the existing approval system and unified approvals in one place. Our 5,000 employees probably will not notice this change much, but I think that is exactly the point. Had it changed, it would have created friction — and we made sure that friction never appeared.

Which institutions or companies would you recommend hunel to — for example, those who have used a legacy HR system for a long time or are facing a large-scale rollout?

If you are an HR lead at a company that has not changed its HR program in a long time, I would want to pass on exactly what I felt going through this project. Even the parts where we wondered "can this really be automated?" actually were automated. The range of what could be developed was wider than I expected, and the project team was open-minded about it, which I think is why the result was even more satisfying. I would recommend adopting hunel to any organization that wants to modernize a long-outdated program, or wants a better HR · attendance · payroll program.

Any advice for those preparing a large-scale HR upgrade at a public institution?

While planning the e-HR upgrade project, we collected complaints about the current system from the HR and payroll leads at all 47 branches nationwide over several rounds. That gave us plenty of material for the proposal, and we organized the items that absolutely needed improvement into a separate table and shared it with the project team. It was useful later to be able to compare that table against the actual deliverables. Gathering input proactively like that will help you a great deal down the line.