Sodales Solutions: Improves Lives and Workforce Relations

Labor management is a critical aspect for any organization. Many companies have unions to ensure that labor policies are fair and consistent for all employees. In unionized work environments, any employee can raise grievances when they feel policies have been violated, which means an organization can have hundreds in a year. All grievances require investigations and arbitration which are recorded on paper. Thus, the process causes traceability headaches, is time-consuming, and can cause trust issues between parties.

Sodales Solutions wanted to create a solution that would simplify this process for management and employees. The ‘Labor Relations Management Application’, developed by SAP partner Sodales Solutions on the SAP Cloud Platform, provides complete transparency to these processes by bringing all relevant information to one location – in the cloud.

“This application improves people’s lives by providing transparency to the employee and management, which promotes trust, saves time and money” stated CHRO manufacturing company. “Our union contract is 200 pages long. Anytime an employee wanted to raise a grievance, they would be spending 30-60 minutes to fill out the paperwork manually including extensive time spent on researching collective agreements and finding the appropriate articles and provisions. Once a grievance was handed to the supervisor, they would be spending another 30-60 minutes to go through the clauses and follow up with management response. We used an entire filing system and process to keep track of grievances with absolutely no reporting available to management. It was an extremely slow and manual error prone process. This application has allowed us to have real time data and stay informed about all the operational issues. Information such as grievance details and management responses, upcoming meeting statuses, past precedence and reporting are readily available. This has helped us to understand the gaps in our supervisory training and fill those gaps. Now we know how much grievances are costing us and understand some of the critical challenges faced by the employees and operational managers on day to day basis”.

The solution comes with pre-built integration content for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP ERP HCM. It provides lifecycle support for human capital management processes such as grievance management, arbitration, maintenance of CBA/rule books and analytical reporting. Using role-based design, this application helps employees to create complaints that go through an automated workflow, pulling employee data, seniority information, contract content and more.

The Labor Relations Management app allows customers to:

• Enable managers to quickly onboard, assign work, schedule and track productivity by location
• Streamline and track paperwork and grievances in real-time providing management with visibility they didn’t have previously; what took 45 minutes now takes a couple of minutes
• Provide scheduling tools to manage timesheet tracking
• Save time, save money and by providing transparency, boosts trust between employees and management

“The labor relations management application has tremendously helped us to streamline our operations. We are now connected with our employees like never before. Since we implemented the application, the number of employee grievances and complaints have reduced by 50% in 6 months as it allowed to see the gaps in operations and help us put focused training programs for our employees and supervisors.”

SAP and our Partners. Improving Lives. That is our purpose.

Ashley Tully
Ashley.Tully@sap.com
Director, Global To-Partner Marketing

Follow Ashley on Twitter – @AshleyTully2

For additional information, please visit the SAP App Center and view the video.