Reference Story
Halle University Hospital shows how to successfully introduce the digital personnel file at a large company
about Halle University Hospital
Halle (Saale) University Hospital is the second largest hospital in Saxony-Anhalt and a maximum care facility. It is an institution under public law, supported by the state of Saxony-Anhalt.
As part of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, it combines patient care, research and teaching. With around 6,000 full-time employees, it comprises more than 30 departments and institutes. It treats around 40,000 inpatients and 195,000 outpatients every year.
hospitals face particular challenges in human resources management
The modernization of administrative processes is of the utmost importance for large institutions such as Halle University Hospital. As a maximum care provider and the largest hospital in Saxony-Anhalt with around 6,000 employees, efficient and future-proof human resources management is essential.
Against this backdrop, the university hospital decided to rely on easy’s digital solutions to comprehensively optimize the administration of personnel matters. Thomas Gerstner, Head of HR Systems and Processes, and Franziska Stahl, SAP HCM Application Administrator, Business Unit II Human Resources, were in charge of coordinating this process. From today’s perspective, neither of them can imagine returning to the previous situation with all the many processes and files to be managed.
In a large university hospital – as in any other hospital – the employees form the heart and backbone of the operation. In addition, personnel files in the medical field are extremely extensive due to the many training courses and qualifications that medical professionals complete. In Halle, they take up over 100 pages on average. This large organization also experiences a high level of fluctuation as there are always many temporary workers, interns and trainees at the clinics and institutes.
files moved to the cloud with easy hr
The HR department therefore decided to completely digitize the personnel files in order to simplify the associated processes and get rid of the voluminous paper files in hanging folders that filled two large rooms. The department’s management had already made an important strategic decision in advance: The new HR system was to be operated as a managed service in the cloud.
From the perspective of the HR experts at the university hospital, there were three main reasons in favor of a cloud solution. Firstly, the cloud offers easier scalability. Secondly, the digital file needed to operate as a stand-alone solution in order to be more independent of SAP HCM (Human Capital Management), which is used as the HR management system for personnel administration and hosted internally on the organization’s own servers. And thirdly, they wanted a system operated as a managed service to become less vulnerable to the shortage of skilled workers in the IT sector.
Key requirements in the software tender therefore included a solution operated in a cloud that meets the high security requirements of a hospital and has interfaces to SAP HCM. easy hr ultimately came out on top of the Europe-wide, highly formalized tender.
“The overall offer from easy was just right,” recalls Thomas Gerstner, “especially since the
price for the service package was also very good.”
all remaining hurdles will be overcome once the project has started
The go-ahead for the project was given in December 2023. Looking back, Ms. Stahl and Mr. Gerstner describe the first few weeks after the start of the project as challenging. There were various reasons for this. The fact that the old files were professionally scanned and digitized by a service provider at the same time as the digital personnel file was introduced placed an additional burden on the entire department.
One of the most important tasks for the introduction of easy hr was to work with easy’s IT experts to integrate the software into the existing HR processes. It quickly became clear that this step required a revision of the existing workflows in the HR department. As Franziska Stahl is very familiar with the processes in HR, she coordinated this part of the project:
“When implementing the software, we took another look at the existing paperbased processes and redesigned them. The introduction of the digital personnel file has opened up completely new possibilities for us.
certain amount of rethinking was required. It’s an ongoing process, meaning that special cases are still cropping up in our work to this day, which we then incorporate into the software.”
The project managers at Halle University Hospital also benefited from easy’s support in this phase:
“They always reacted very quickly to find a solution,” says Franziska Stahl.
digitization transforms many processes
easy hr finally went live in May 2024. The solution primarily serves as a digital personnel file to ensure good document management and organization as well as to digitally implement the associated workflows.
To guarantee that these goals were fully met, all media discontinuities were removed from the HR processes. Incoming paper documents are scanned in the mailroom with easy capture, so they also enter into the system in digital form.
These changes allowed many processes to be more comprehensively standardized and automated. Document deletion was set up in the software according to the dual control principle, and automated deletion deadlines were created for certain document types. Important documents such as salary statements and wage tax certificates are now provided to employees in digital form via the portal.
one solution, many advantages
The further the project progressed, the clearer the advantages of the new digital solution became. The constant availability of the digital file on electronic devices simplifies many processes in the large healthcare institution:
“If a specific personnel case is discussed in a meeting, for example, an HR manager with the necessary access rights can simply open the relevant file right there and provide the information directly,” explains Franziska Stahl.
The digital file has also finally made it possible for employees in the HR department to work from home. This was very helpful during the changeover to the new processes:
“This way, we also created a new lifestyle benefit for our employees.”
Another important point concerns the issue of archiving, as Thomas Gerstner explains:
“Employees now have immediate access to all information and don’t have to go to the archive to get files. Thanks to the search options, archived documents can also be found very quickly. And the space required for the archive, the two rooms full of files, has also been freed up.”
The bottom line is that HR staff at Halle University Hospital also see the introduction of the digital file as a major efficiency gain. Processes are now more transparent and faster, leaving employees more time for other tasks. In addition, the new, digitally defined workflows lead to fewer manual errors. Plus: Paper consumption in the HR department has halved thanks to easy hr.
However, Ms. Stahl and Mr. Gerstner are far from finished when it comes to digitizing the HR processes. In the future, easy hr will be integrated into the processes even more deeply. The potential of the software will be utilized even more extensively by adding an automatic completeness check for personnel files, automating the creation of employment references, introducing digital signatures for employment contracts and engaging in digital recruiting.
“there is definitely no way back for us. everyone is grateful that we have the digital file from easy. in the beginning, it was certainly not always easy to make this
change in our heads and get everyone used to moving away from paper. but now we could not even imagine returning to the old system.”
Thomas Gerstner,
Head of Human Resources Systems and Processes | Halle University Hospital
