Housing provider to transform HR and payroll in MHR partnership

The technology is part of its digital transformation vision and will help the organisation drive down costs.

Currently employing 238 people in a variety of roles, Southway is set to launch the market-leading iTrent solution with MHR in April 2021. This will remove time-consuming manual tasks from HR and payroll while providing more detailed analytics across its people functions.

For Southway, an immediate benefit of iTrent will be in the onboarding of new employees. This will enable every new employee to be ready on the day they start, without having to complete a range of forms and read through lots of policies on day one.

MHR is also helping Southway improve its HR processes, adding a whole new level of automated functionality and process efficiency. For Southway, the move to iTrent will fulfil its commitment to make the best use of its resources to achieve its social objectives. As well as processing data intelligently, iTrent will reduce costs, enable seamless integration with its finance team for variable pay calculations, and improve its processes for managing absence, sickness, holiday and maternity leave.

The MHR solution will also benefit individual employees, who will have more time freed to focus on tenants and in providing the high quality, affordable homes sought by people in South Manchester.

Southway’s Head of HR, Nigel Shaw, said: “We know that manual spreadsheets just aren’t fit for purpose when efficiency and accuracy is essential in today’s economy.”

“Our goal is to future-proof our service and get the best from our people and our workforce. In addition, our recruitment process sits outside the current system, and there is no onboarding functionality at all. Replacing all of this with iTrent gives us a modern and integrated, single supplier solution for all our recruitment, HR and payroll functions...from advertising and recruitment decisions to screening and onboarding.”

“Storing data in one place on iTrent will reduce the amount of storage capacity and improve the accuracy of the data held. Currently, our system can’t efficiently store personnel data such as letters and appraisals.”

“iTrent will enable employee self-serve, which means employees can access their own payslips online and on their smartphones. In addition, self-serve will enable everyone to process their variable expenses and overtime removing the potential of forms getting lost making delays in payment.”

“We have found the support from the MHR team to be very professional. They are knowledgeable in their product which gives us confidence that we have made the correct business choice in using MHR and iTrent.”

MHR CEO, Anton Roe, said: “We look forward to working closely with Southway Housing’s HR team on this transformation journey, providing a valuable service to support the business and its employees. It’s great to be able to welcome Southway Housing to MHR.”

Moving forwards, Southway Housing is looking towards a better-connected workforce, with employees feeling more in control of their data and confident in its accuracy. The organisation also intends to adopt further iTrent functionality such as Business Objects, a tool which enables the HR team to monitor and improve business performance, measuring what is working, what is not, where to cut costs and where to invest more.