Dorset Council’s HR team spent a large amount of time grappling with complicated employee contracts and HR letters. Their employee contracts are complex documents tailored specifically to each individual, with a personalised cover letter and a number of different sections, which vary depending on the type of staff contract and the specific employee conditions.

The process used by the team was to extract relevant information from Infotype 906 in SAP, manipulate data in MS Excel, and then use a macro to copy and paste into MS Word – followed by manual adjustments as needed. This was a cumbersome, error-prone and time-consuming exercise.

As existing clients of EPI-USE Labs, Dorset Council was impressed with the functionality offered by Query Manager, which enables the council to produce real-time HCM reports. Using the existing Query Manager technology,  Dorset Council decided to invest in Document Builder to automate the production of their employee contracts.

Document Builder has allowed Dorset Council to streamline their processes and save a considerable amount of time to reinvest into more valued-added services. It means they can negate the manual effort involved, and quickly and securely produce individualised contracts. They can create personalised cover letters and statements of particulars (hours of work, and other conditions of employment) in a table format, with different layout and headers as needed, based on the Query Manager report.

“The option of being able to select conditional paragraphs and conditional pages is a real game-changer for us,” says Richard Cain, HR Systems Adviser at Dorset Council. “It means we can tailor the documents easily for a wide range of different employment conditions, and produce professional-looking letters and contracts. As we produce contracts for over 15,000 employees, this is a huge benefit.

“What’s valuable is that not only do you have all the power of Query Manager available, but you can also make additional decisions in Document Builder itself. For example, you can make changes on the front screen when you use it, so if there is some data not available in an unusual scenario, you can override the templates.”

“Overall we have been very happy with Document Builder; it was a very worthwhile investment for us, and we’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response from those using it,” said Richard. “The new way of doing things is much, much quicker – we just enter a few details and run the report – and most of the information is in the system anyway. We can create different versions for different customers, and take out the manual work.

“At the moment we’re just using it for employment contracts, but there are many other options such as variation letters and contracts for temporary staff. We’re also hoping to use it for other complicated letters, for cases such as unpaid leave, and auto-enrolment pension letters. Once we have the basic letter template drafted, we can use it for a wide range of purposes.

“Document Builder itself is quite straightforward to use; we received a day’s training from EPI-USE Labs which was excellent. Also, the subsequent follow-up support and help, from both the service consultant and the support team in quickly tailoring solutions for us, has been very impressive.”