Success Stories

Minnesota Life

OrgPlus Provides a Complete Solution for Planning & Communicating Organizational Structure

When Minnesota Life, a nationwide provider of insurance, pension and investment products, set out to improve the organizational charting process, they chose to upgrade to OrgPlus Professional.

A longtime OrgPlus Standard user, Minnesota Life found that when used together, OrgPlus Standard and OrgPlus Professional provided a complete solution for planning and communicating organizational information. Using OrgPlus Standard, managers still had the tools they needed for scenario planning and workforce management, while the automatic chart creation and publishing features of OrgPlus Professional gave the entire company access to the most current view of the organization.

Minnesota Life was spending considerable time and money manually updating and then distributing paper copies of the company organizational chart. As a result of the time required to manually update and print hard copies of the chart, management rarely had a current view of the organization.

Finding a better way to view the organization was another challenge. With no means for viewing the chart other than in printed format, each manager had no choice but to work with more than 80 pages of paper. This made viewing the organization both cumbersome and complicated.

"We only updated the chart on a quarterly basis because of the time required. It took at least a week to update the chart and then another couple of days to verify the information for accuracy," said Carmen Mazza, HRIS Manager at Minnesota Life. "Since there was no way to publish the information electronically, we had to print out and distribute paper copies of the report each quarter. This was not only time consuming, but the cost of paper really adds up."

For years Minnesota Life was using OrgPlus Standard to create organizational charts. While OrgPlus Standard did not automate the process for creating charts, it was an excellent tool for scenario planning. This form of planning involves modeling different structures of the organization based on different scenarios or conditions. For instance, the company could get a snapshot of what their workforce might look like in certain key departments such as sales and marketing based on revenue projections.

Upon further investigation, Minnesota Life learned about OrgPlus Professional, a desktop software product with all the functionality of OrgPlus Standard, as well as the ability to automatically create and publish organizational charts in a variety of formats, including publishing to the company intranet. Moving to OrgPlus Professional also allowed Minnesota Life to automatically create and update organizational charts based on data imported from an Excel spreadsheet instead of entering the data manually and then verifying the charts for accuracy. As a result, Minnesota Life is now able to automatically update the charts in a fraction of the time and eliminate the need to review for any manual data entry errors.

"We were excited to discover OrgPlus Professional," explained Mazza. "We can now produce accurate organizational charts on a frequent basis, and we still benefit from using OrgPlus Standard for planning purposes. OrgPlus has provided our organization with a complete solution for meeting our planning and communication requirements."

HumanConcepts is the leading provider of workforce modelling and intelligence solutions. With its OrgPlus technology charting millions of employees for organizations worldwide, including 400 of the Fortune 500, HumanConcepts has defined best practices in organizational charting. OrgPlus integrates with HR systems to automatically create, update and distribute organizational charts for team collaboration, workforce planning and critical decision-making. OrgPlus integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office applications.

HumanConcepts is based in California with offices in the United Kingdom and Germany and offers OrgPlus software and services worldwide. For more information visit www.orgplus.co.uk.