solution

• ***PROVIDE A SUMMARY/OVERVIEW ON THE WRITING BELOW****
• Provide a critique of the writing (evaluate/ analyze/ assess).
• Discuss its usefulness/ benefits to the discussion on HRIS implementation—based on your knowledge of HRIS and HRIS implementation.

A multimedia company planned to offer a special benefits package to a select group of employees to retire early, which would provide cost savings to the company, as well as meet some of its other needs, such as providing promotional opportunities to help attract and retain younger employees. The special package included granting additional years of service for the purposes of calculating retirement and retiree medical benefits, granting additional age to employees to be used in the calculation of eligibility for early-retirement incentives from the pension plan, and eliminating some portion of the normal reductions in pension plan benefits for those taking early retirement. The cost of implementing these changes in the existing system for the estimated eligible group of just over 500 employees was prohibitive due to the complex nature of the calculations involved.The project was in danger of being canceled until a careful needs analysis was done. For 500 employees, did the solution need to be fully automated? Did the employees need to be able to model their retirement benefits on the Internet? How much manual work could be relied on to handle the workload? Did the project need to be repeatable?The answer for the multimedia company was to build a simple solution outside its HRIS using spreadsheet and word merge applications and to couple that simple solution with a high touch customer service group that was able to respond to the needs of program participants, manage the increased manual paperwork requirements, and perform the interventions into the system to make the components that had to be automated, such as the payment of benefits, function properly. The program that had nearly been canceled was a success, so much so that it was repeated the next year in another company division.Implementing the changes in the existing HRIS would have been the obvious solution, but creating a one-time solution when it appeared there would be little future need for a complicated implementation was the right choice in this case. Careful, honest, and practical needs analysis made possible what had been impractical due to cost concerns. It should be noted, however, that the HRIS provider recognized the need the multimedia provider company had expressed and later made a decision to augment its software to include features that would provide greater flexibility for future offerings, meeting a need the provider had not recognized during its own original planning and needs analysis.