Deployment of People System Portal (PSP)(BH Excess)

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National Agreed Interim Joint Statement covering the Deployment of People System Portal (PSP)

Introduction

PSP is a new system which will replace Royal Mail Group’s payroll and HR systems. Built on globally recognised SAP technology PSP will integrate the 17 existing HR systems into one portal providing a more efficient payroll and HR system for managers and employees.

Without this investment, Royal Mail Group would have been operating one of the largest weekly payrolls in the world from an aging system which would have become increasingly unsupported. As a consequence of this change to the payroll system, when an employee’s pay record transfers from the current system Infinium onto SAP, a new pay number will be generated. This will be visible on employee’s payslips which will also change. An example of the ‘new’ payslip is shown below. There will be no change to employees existing methods or frequency of payment as a consequence of the introduction of PSP.




Detailed communications will be sent out to all affected employees just before their Region / Business Unit goes live. This will include an explanation of the new payslip.

The SAP system is based on ‘workflow’ determined by a rigorous organisational structure. A thorough data cleanse of the organisational structure and line manager alignment will take place prior to the decision to ‘go live’ in each region or Business Unit. Workflow ensures that work items get dealt with, the relevant authorities are obtained and that items which fail to get dealt with are escalated automatically to the second line manager.

The first deployment of PSP successfully went ‘live’ on 29th May 2011 in:

HR Services (including payroll)
Corporate Functions
Commercial
Letters Central Operations Support
Northern Ireland

Accessibility

Legal advice has been sought to ensure that the People System Portal is compliant with all Data Protection Act legislative requirements and has been certified as such.

Managers will be able to access PSP from their PCs. This will enable them to view data about their employees instead of having to submit a request to the HR service centre which is the case now. This is intended to improve the ability of line managers to quickly resolve staff queries. Only data that is required for managers to undertake their duties will be made available. There are strict controls in place which determine what data can be viewed. Equally, strict governance will be in place to avoid input errors into the ‘live’ system

Employee details will only be viewed by people who need the information to do their job. Line managers will be able to access information about their employee’s sickness and leave records, but they will not have access to personal information such as bank details. In order to provide more security regarding a change to bank details within PSP, a letter will automatically be sent to an employee’s home address to confirm the change has been made. This letter will be personalised but will not contain the employee’s bank details.

Only relevant business information will be available to Line Managers (pay details, some personal details, absence and live conduct history, etc). Elements, which are not directly relevant to an employee’s working role, will be hidden from Line Managers. These include Bank Account details, expired conduct details, certain deductions from NET pay (e.g. CWU-Membership) and religious denomination monitoring details (Northern Ireland only).

The system has also been built to accommodate Bookroom type roles and where appropriate access will be given to people who need to perform such tasks (LAs, A-level task duties, DOM supports etc). This will be agreed with the leadership teams in each region. These individuals will only be able to access the part of system required to do these transactions, they will not have access to anybody’s personal data.

Employees will have access to information about themselves on request to their line manager.



Annual leave

There is no material change to the amount of leave which employees are entitled to. Annual leave will continue to be allocated to employees based on the hours they work and their contractual entitlements in terms of leave. However the PSP will record and process annual leave in hours instead of days, meaning that leave entitlements will be reduced by the actual hours and minutes taken – not days as is current practice. This means that leave can now be taken in hours if a full day is not required.

For example an employee contracted to work on a Tuesday for 6 hours will have 6 hours deducted from their leave entitlement rather than 1 day, alternatively an employee contracted to work 9 hrs will have 9 hours deducted rather than 1 day.

The leave year will continue to run from April to March. Leave entitlements will be rounded up to the nearest half day and will then be converted into hours. When leave is taken, it will be reduced by hours and minutes with no rounding, except by the conversion to decimals. This is the only change to annual leave. Leave entitlements and the principles of how this is allocated will not be changing whatsoever.

Where someone starts or leaves part way through the year their leave entitlement will be pro-rated by dividing their contractual entitlement by (the total number of days in the holiday year divided by those remaining).

Leave reserves will continue to have their annual leave allocated in days converted to standard 8 hour days. Therefore a day is a standard day for leave, absence, pay deductions etc.

Communications, training and support will be provided to Bookroom staff on how to manage this transition from annual leave in days to hours. This will be rolled out as part of the PSP roll out so not all regions will change at the same time.

The amount of days left at the end of the entitlement year for an employee will be carried over automatically in the system. Negative leave balances created due to transition to the new system will be waived.
Where an individual wishes to take a days leave but has a shortfall in remaining hours to do so they will be allowed, in agreement with their manager, to draw the shortfall in hours down from next years leave allocation with that leave allocation being adjusted accordingly.

The annual leave purchase scheme remains unaffected by this change over to PSP.


Bank & Public Holidays

Normal Bank Holiday arrangements will continue to apply. Employees who work a bank holiday will continue to get either overtime or a day in lieu. The number of hours worked on the Bank Holiday will be credited back into the annual leave quota* (as a bank holiday day off in lieu). The system automatically credits hours worked back to the employee when the correct bank holiday payment is selected. Arrangements for part timers will continue to be pro-rated to ensure everyone is treated fairly regardless of the days in the week they work.

*For clarity where an individual works 2 hours or more and they choose a day in lieu they will be credited with hour’s equivalent to their average attendance for that week.

Where an individual’s rest day coincides with a Bank Holiday they will have the option of being credited with a day in lieu equivalent to the hours they would normally work on that day or alternatively they can claim BH excess equivalent to the hours they would normally work on that day


Recording of Work Hours

Employees will have their hours recorded in line with their duty/duty sets/rotations.
Leave reserves will be placed into a generic work schedule which the manager will need to manually adjust to reflect the hours actually worked.
Rest day covers will continue to have their hours recorded in line with their duty set/rotation.
PSP has no impact on the 1 week off in 6 (Wallington) system and all existing arrangements remain unaffected.

Maternity, Paternity & Adoptive leave

There is no change to the allocation and recording of maternity, paternity or adoptive leave. They will be recorded in the system using the appropriate absence type.

Sick leave and Special leave recording

Sick leave and special leave will continue to be recorded in days. As such there is no change to the current process except that it will be managed on the system.

Sick whilst on holiday

There is no change to policy or approach as a result of PSP. If an Annual Leave record already exists on the system and then a subsequent Sick Absence is entered this will create a ‘collision’, but it will allow the User to make the entry. The same principal applies if the sick absence is before the Annual Leave or on the same day. A manager will receive a collision notification prompting them to amend or delete the Annual Leave record if the dates overlap.

If a manager does not amend or delete the Annual Leave record, this will be picked up when the Absence Collision Report is run by Payroll. An Exception message will be generated but this will not prevent Payroll from running, as the Sick Absence will always take precedent. HRS will then contact the Manager to inform them of this issue.

In such instances Annual Leave will not be deducted from the employees Quota but the record will still exist so this will need to be amended or deleted to ensure records are accurate.

Network - Professional Drivers

Bank Holidays

The terms of the Professional Drivers Agreement in relation to Bank Holiday attendance will be unaffected by the deployment of PSP. Any driver required to work on a Bank holiday will be credited with core hours for the attendance regardless of the actual duration of the attendance.

For a five day attendance on the week with a bank holiday the credit will be 7.25 hours, four days 9.10 hours etc. Attendances of less than core will still be credited with the full amount and attendances above core will attract Overtime rates for the excess time.



Annual Leave

All full weeks taken as leave will be deducted at the rate of 36.25 hours. This is regardless of the actual scheduled hour of attendance on the leave week. Single days taken as leave will be deducted on the basis of core hours depending on the number of attendances in the week as per the current Professional Drivers Agreement arrangements.



Current Roll out plan as at August 2011 (this is now under the change control of the PSP Steering Board)

Deployment
Regions
Commences
Go Live
1
Northern Ireland
October 2010
29 May 2011
2
Wales & SE
May 2011
October 2011
3
North East & London
July 2011
January 2012
4
Thames Valley & Anglia
September 2011
March 2012
5
North West & Scotland
December 2011
May 2012
6
South West, PFW, Logistics
January 2012
June 2012
7
Midlands & International Ops
February 2012
July 2012


Ongoing Communication and Involvement

CWU Divisional/Regional and Area/Local reps will be fully briefed prior to roll out and all information shared as the roll out takes place in each region. Any training requirements will be agreed at Divisional/Regional level.

Royal Mail’s central programme team will meet monthly with the CWU at national level to review progress and update and or revise roll out as required, including any operational issues which may arise.




Royal Mail CWU




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