Toronto AthleticGear

HRA722 – Assignment 1 – Toronto AthleticGear

Due: Wednesday March 6, 2019

Total marks:                       80

Percent of final grade:     20%

Individual/Group:             You can opt to do this assignment either individually or in groups of no more than 3

Mark Weighting:               20% of final grade

Length of Report:              15 pages (maximum), double spaced, font size 12, Calibri

Submission method:          to be submitted via SafeAssign on Blackboard

This assignment will help you to gain insights into the importance of HRIS to the HR function, and to relate this to some of the issues we are raising in this course. Please review the case below and submit a report as outlined in the “Assignment requirements” section.

HRIS Case: Toronto AthleticGear

Martha Meadows, the head of Finance and HR of Toronto AthleticGear (TAG), is struggling to ensure that she is well equipped, from an HR perspective, to support the company’s rapid growth. TAG was formed two years ago with just six employees, including the CEO, the head of sales and Martha. The company designs and makes high-end athletic clothing right here in Toronto. Initially the clothing was only available online and, as it was a new company, there was not a very high demand for the clothing. However, they have just entered into an agreement with a major Canadian retailer to distribute their clothing to hundreds of locations across the country, and they will have to hire 20 more employees to make the clothing and to warehouse and ship the items to each store.

Martha realizes that she can no longer handle all of the HR functions manually and that she will need an IT solution for at least one of them. Her biggest concern is payroll. She has been tracking employee hours and earnings on a spreadsheet. Employees each have a time card which they sign at the reception each day when they arrive at TAG and again when they leave. Every week, Martha then enters this information into a spreadsheet, double checks if the pay, overtime and deductions are calculated accurately. This ends up being very time-consuming as she has to be very careful and check to see that there are no errors. She then manually writes out the paychecks and provides them to the employees each week. The deductions from the gross pay must be put aside and remitted to the government at the appropriate times. The appropriate payroll records also must be maintained for audits.

Martha’s typical weekly timeline is:

·        
Tuesday: gather the timecards for the previous week and verify that they are correct for each employee.

·        
Wednesday: enter the information into a spreadsheet and ensure that the calculations (eg. overtime pay, deductions) are calculated properly.

·        
Thursday: check to ensure that there are sufficient funds in the payroll account. Often, additional funds have to be transferred from another of the company’s accounts depending on if employees had to work a lot of overtime during the prior week to fulfil a big order.

·        
Friday: print the paycheques and hand them out to employees before noon.

Martha knows she cannot continue with this process when the additional 20 employees are on board, and is looking for a better solution that is faster, more efficient and error-free. While payroll processing is her biggest priority, she is also very interested in how technology could help with time tracking, employee scheduling and benefits management, and possibly other areas in the longer term such as performance management and recruitment. She knows that HR information systems (HRIS) could be costly and is concerned that the CEO, who is a new entrepreneur with no knowledge of human resources management, will likely resist a move to HRIS due to the time and expense involved and will need to be shown the value of it. Martha has hired you for your HRIS expertise and would like you to help her prepare a report that she could provide to the CEO.

Assignment requirements

Please provide a report that Martha can submit to the CEO. The report should contain the following:

1.      
Executive summary

2.      
The importance of information management to HR.

3.      
How HRIS could meet TAG’s immediate and future HR management needs (based on information provided in the case).

4.      
How TAG’s payroll process could be improved by HRIS. This should be illustrated by using a workflow diagram showing the current payroll process and pointing out which steps could be improved with HRIS.

5.      
Identification of two leading HRIS solutions for payroll specifically, and an example/case study of how their solutions have helped to address their clients’ payroll needs.

Evaluation Marking Scheme

Please just do the three red highlight parts.

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