Human Resources Technology Castle's Family Restaurant Business Plan: Stage III

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This section should be written last. It provides the reader with an overview of your business plan. This section includes a brief description of the business, the goal of your business plan, your customer's market/clientele, their current "like" competition, and current business operations, and potential fiscal plan (fiscal plan may be assumed based on current manual process compared to pricing of automation).

Introduction provides sufficient background on the topic and previews major points. Conclusion is logical, flows from the body of the paper, and reviews the major points.

Company Review

This section should summarize the information from your Stage I paper. Provide a basic industry outline. Is it a growth industry? What changes do you foresee in this industry, and how is this company poised to take advantage of them? Take the information from your Stage I paper and analyze the data. What is your analysis of their current business? This will require some additional outside research. Cite your sources.

Business Analysis

This is where you will provide an expanded review of your Stage II project where you will summarize that information and provide your analysis of this customer's business. This section needs to be thorough and accurate so your customer understands the issues you've found. You must validate and substantiate the issues identified and why they are creating inefficiency and cost to the business. Why is automation viable? Why did you choose this specific HR function? This is where the current fiscal information should be placed. This may be completed based on theory. It should line up with your next sections of this business plan.

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HRIS Type/Comparison

This is also information you would pull from your Stage II paper and research. You want to share the type of HRIS system you have reviewed and why. You need to expand on this comparison and include theory to substantiate. This is where you're providing a clear review of different vendors. You want to make it understandable to your customer.

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HRIS Recommendation

Pull together all of your research here. Share the vendor recommendation. You must validate and substantiate this recommendation. Just stating this is what "you think" would be the best vendor is not enough. You must show this customer that this "is" the best recommendation and why. Theory substantiates; what have other like companies used? This is where you include business risks, fiscal impact, impact on employees and customers, etc. Remember, you don't want to "over sell" an HRIS system. Make recommendations that fit the needs of your analysis. 14

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Executive Summary

Castle Restaurants provides casual dining for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at eight locations throughout Northern California. The restaurant operates on volume and therefore the turnover ratio is important to the success of the restaurant. In providing the best operational managerial services to the restaurant, the HR manager incorporated PeopleSoft HRIS HRM solution to manage the HRIS function.

The operations of Castle Restaurant does seek to grow from operating at the margin to increasing profitability at each of eight locations. The goal of increasing profitability is enabled by selecting the most appropriate choice in HRIS software that will allow the HR manager to address areas of the operation that are not as easily managed by streamlining the process via a software solution. To increase profitability, the HR manager is free and can now focus on quality improvement and process management.

Introduction

Castle Family Restaurants is in need of a comprehensive human resources information system (HRIS) capable of streamlining the labor management of the organization across its 8 restaurants employing approximately 340 employees. The need for a comprehensive HRIS arises due to the length of time and expenditure of energy required upon the HR manager to track and log employee hours and payroll data using an excel spreadsheet. Via travelling to each location in Northern California, the HR manager manages the scheduling, recruiting, hiring, and answering of queries from the employee/staff. PeopleSoft Software is the HRIS of choice.

Company Review

Castle's Family Restaurant is a busy casual diner type of establishment serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The restaurant employs a high volume approach by serving a large number of guests in a short amount of time. Think of the short order cook and the fast turnover with regard to revenue and expense management. The time each customer sits in their chair is an expense to the restaurant, unless the customer continues to order from the menu, or if coffee refills are charged as extra upon the initial charge.

Benefits are not part of the monetary equation for these workers generally an hourly wage is what is paid in return for their labor. The compensation management aspect of the company is relatively easy to manage. Expenses related to gasoline are important, as usually the purchase of a comprehensive system such as PeopleSoft for HRIS would normally be cost prohibitive. The increases in the price of gas have forced management to reconsider the cost of using HRIS software to mitigate the increase in gasoline expense.
The level of supervision commanded by the HR manager Morgan is not conducive to effective operations management as time spent on travelling in between restaurant locations coupled with the time taken to log and input data prevents the manager from attending to more important and detailed work within the operations management of the company's eight locations. Hence, the PeopleSoft HRIS is designed to aggregate and handle the tasks associated with data entry, data tracking, and the data information requirements for HR payroll management and subsequent accounting functions (Healthfield, 2010).

Castle's Family Restaurant operates on razor thin profit margins as is and therefore any cost savings or expenditure must be in line with current operating margins such that margins do not decrease further. The purchase of any HRIS is considered to be a preventative measure enabling the increase of profit margins rather the promotion of software to which margins decrease at the expense of perhaps marginally superior HRM.

The HRIS function of PeopleSoft is very comprehensive such that all components of the software will not be necessary to engage the management of the business. Indeed, the eight locations, non-contiguously located, are better controlled via a virtual environment if employees can log on and engage a human resources management system to track their hours rather than the manager arriving on location to engage the employees or to review hand written time sheets to obtain the payroll management data.

The ability of empowering the HR management via the PeopleSoft HRIS HRM does allow for the manager to now refocus the energy and effort on quality control and improvement through the possible use of process management. The requirement of travelling to each restaurant location is still a function of the HR management's work duty however now the management can focus on the area of quality control rather the tedious process of human resources management, specifically the logging of payroll data.

Business Analysis

The choice to proceed with the HRIS solution was not spurious nor was the decision made from laziness or a lack of effort to pursue the payroll and scheduling management end of restaurant management. The PeopleSoft HRIS management software tool was chosen as it is easy to learn. A short learning curve for our staff is critical to providing a smooth and relatively error-free transition to the new software. Additionally, the software is capable of handling all of the restaurant's HRM functions rather seamlessly. There is no need to improvise onto the software as all the managerial functions for payroll, scheduling, and additional data entry areas are already incorporated into the software, which align in accordance with the human resources operations for Castle Restaurants.

PeopleSoft HRIS functions using a database to aggregate employee data for payroll and schedule coordination/management. This feature enables management to keep track of the aggregated data but only deal with key indicators from the data via the online format. The software is able to integrate onto the online data display format, which enables Morgan to remotely access the PeopleSoft database files from a virtual location and obtain the data that once had to be obtained by physically travelling to the location and manually inputting the data according to hand-written payroll files.

Although the PeopleSoft software can handle the expanded HRM load of benefits management and labor scheduling based on business activity and staff workload, these areas are considered to be 'luxuries' rather than the key critical components of HRM management that Mr. Morgan is seeking. More importantly, PeopleSoft is relatively inexpensive when compared to alternatives in the market that may have as a requirement, database networking coupled to expensive hardware requirements.

The main competition for PeopleSoft with regard to selection in handling Castle Restaurant's HRM is Ultimate Software's ULTIPRO. The ULTIPRO is similar to PeopleSoft as it is on-demand software that enables HRM to perform the same management tasks as other competitor HRIS applications. ULTIPRO however does appear to have a considerable operating cost structure that is higher than PeopleSoft. More IT support is…