Success Stories

Utilities Company

OrgPlus Professional Sheds New Light on Organizational Charting for Utilities Company, Enabling Automation and Planning

One of the largest natural gas and electric utilities in the United States needed to create a clear visual representation of the retirement status for 3000 non-union employees.

For the purpose of analyzing employee benefits as well as scenario and succession planning, the human resources department wanted to visually distinguish between employees who would be retiring in five years with benefits, employees who would be retiring in five years without benefits and employees who were not retiring in the next five years.

This information needed to be displayed in a multitude of sub-charts broken down by the various departments. An evaluation for a solution led to OrgPlus Professional. With OrgPlus, they can automate the process for creating the organizational charts and use OrgPlus planning tools to quickly visualize employee retirement status for informed decision making around succession planning.

The HR manager was creating charts in PowerPoint, which offered no automation, functionality or features outside of very basic, manual chart creation. Using PowerPoint to create over 150 individual sub-charts, where each box must be selected and then individually formatted to reflect retirement status, required days and potentially months of manual work. And, because there are no sub-charting capabilities with PowerPoint, creating a sub-chart meant manually creating a new chart in a new PowerPoint file for every sub-chart. As a result, the HR manager would have to manage over 150 PowerPoint files. In addition, any time information in the charts changed, the HR manager would have to search through a multitude of files and manually make each change. The company needed a better solution for presenting and managing organizational information to achieve effective, real-time analysis and planning around the information.

To remedy the situation, the Utilities company began a search for a solution that would allow them to automate and refine the process for creating, formatting and updating their charts. After careful evaluation, they chose OrgPlus because it allowed them to easily manage organizational change and could be configured to handle their succession planning needs. Succession planning involves putting in place processes and procedures to safeguard valuable employee contributions in the event that employees leave their positions. Following a successful implementation, OrgPlus provided the Utilities company with a robust solution for creating, formatting and maintaining current organizational charts in a fraction of the time it would take in PowerPoint, while giving them a way to plan for the future.

Using the OrgPlus conditional formatting feature, the company was able to build formatting conditions for their data that automatically formatted the boxes to visually represent retirement status. As a result, all employees retiring in five years with benefits were represented by a dark grey box, while employees retiring in five years without benefits were displayed in light grey boxes. Thanks to OrgPlus’ timesaving tools, once the formatting is established, it is automatically applied to the charts. Also, OrgPlus enables easy navigation through multiple sub-charts, and displays all of the sub-charts in one, easy to manage file. Moving to OrgPlus meant not only saving valuable time and creating greater efficiencies within the Human Resources group but enabled real-time analysis and planning to achieve corporate goals.

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.