Success Stories

Stryker Corporation

Stryker Implements Intelligent Organizational Charting with OrgPlus® Enterprise, Extracting Data Directly from Oracle E-Business Suite

Stryker Corporation (NYSE: SYK) is a preeminent orthopedic medical products company with nearly $5 billion in annual sales worldwide. The company continually strives to refine its management practices which have kept it healthy in the competitive medical device industry for more than 65 years. To maintain market advantage, Stryker realized that its global management team needed instant and accurate workforce information for critical decision-making. With more than 17,000 employees spanning 10 different divisions, it was essential for Stryker to centralize and communicate organizational structure and employee information to management.

Each division within Stryker was manually creating organization charts with Microsoft Visio and Excel, which was labor-intensive, and required 15-20 people across the corporation to maintain. Stryker sought a solution to reduce the overall number of labor hours spent on the charting process in order to cut costs associated with gathering information, and creating and maintaining the charts. Stryker needed to visualize the workforce at all times, and sought a solution that would not only automate the organization charting process, but keep them current.

Stryker's HRMS Technical Analyst admits that they were creating only one organization chart per year because of the labor expense. Additionally, the information in the charts about the workforce was out-of-date as soon as the project was completed. The analyst estimates that the time spent compiling the charts at the corporate level, and the lag time between creating and publishing the charts, made more than 25 percent of the information in the chart inaccurate.

Stryker realized that it needed to be able to automate this process in order to reduce costs and to keep the information relevant. The company knew organization charting automation was the key to making better business decisions at the management and executive level.

Stryker implemented OrgPlus® Enterprise company-wide to address the problems and expenses of manual charting. OrgPlus integrated seamlessly with the company's Oracle 11i HRMS system. OrgPlus retrieved HR data directly from the Oracle database for all of the divisions and centralized it into one location. Each division's organization chart is now created and updated using OrgPlus, and is accessible to management throughout the company.

With OrgPlus Enterprise, Stryker's organization charts literally build themselves. As employees are added into the company's Oracle HRMS system, the charts are updated in real-time.

Stryker employees became familiar with the software quickly, and training time was minimal. The employees using OrgPlus learned to use it with ease and could immediately begin manipulating data, such as adding open positions. OrgPlus allowed Stryker to get away from the plain white box and line organization chart by using OrgPlus chart templates or by manually adding color, box styles and highlighting certain people.

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.