Success Stories

Peoples Energy

Peoples Energy Meets Employee and Executive Expectations for Organizational Information

For Peoples Energy, tracking employee roles, responsibilities and their overall employee reporting structure was a fundamental business requirement. However, because of IT resource constraints, the company was not prepared to install and maintain another enterprise application.

That's when their HR team looked to OrgPlus On-Demand, a hosted version of OrgPlus Enterprise, to provide Peoples Energy employees with access to organizational charts online and give managers secure, summarized analytics for improved workforce planning.

Founded in the 1850s, Peoples Energy delivers natural gas to one million homes and businesses in the Chicago metropolitan area. A smaller organization with advanced technology systems, Peoples Energy required an organizational charting solution that could be managed with minimal effort, and provide secure, online access to charts and the confidential information they contain.

Peoples Energy required a solution that would:

• Seamlessly integrate with their PeopleSoft HRMS
• Provide secure employee record access by role
• Provide workforce summary profiles and analytics

After evaluating several alternatives, Peoples Energy selected OrgPlus On-Demand. OrgPlus On-Demand is a hosted version of OrgPlus Enterprise, developed for companies that want to maintain organizational charts without the overhead of managing software. It is an ideal solution for smaller companies, or outsource-driven organizations that are charting employees from an HR system and need to securely and dynamically present their organizational structure online.

Initially Peoples Energy used OrgPlus Professional to help organize, arrange and track their reporting relationships across the entire company. The drag and drop functionality of OrgPlus allowed them to easily document these relationships and export them to a file that was fed directly to PeopleSoft. They needed to organize reporting relationships for performance management and learning applications that had to be implemented quickly. OrgPlus helped them accomplish the rollout and provided organizational charts needed to manage organizational change.

Once the reporting structure was established and validated, it was integrated with OrgPlus On-Demand so Peoples Energy employees could display their organizational charts online and launch charts from their company intranet. The OrgPlus interface ported PeopleSoft data direct to their charts, providing current employee profiles. This job and department information would be helpful for management to know, especially when considering reorganizations and workforce change in general. Salary information and summary analytics were also added so managers could begin to create HR dashboards that support budgeting, planning and recruiting activities.

Because of the privacy laws governing employee information and the sensitivity companies have about access to privileged information, it was absolutely critical that Peoples Energy could be assured that the right employees had access to the right information and management-level data was accessible only by role. OrgPlus On-Demand met the company's security requirements, and People's Energy has been impressed with the ease in which they can manage roles and authorized-only access rules.

What began as a quest to document their reporting structure for new HR applications became a critical business tool for People's Energy, providing much more than simple organizational charting data. Now with OrgPlus On-Demand, employees can access org charts online, see reporting structures and better understand company strategy. And managers can consistently and accurately assess the organization as it is currently structured and quickly respond to changing market conditions.

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.humanconcepts.com.