In response to demands from their corporate managers, the need to offer self-service functionality to all their managers was identified. Custom solutions were being created on a tactical basis for some HR processes but most of the manager’s tasks involved the HR department personnel. While this met many of their requirements from a process standpoint, productivity was down. The HR department was overwhelmed with requests which slowed down the turnaround. The solution lacked a common process and proved difficult for managers to quickly manage their teams. It was clear that a new, simplified approach was required.

The cleint, MPS Partners and MIcrosoft worked with the CIO, VP of IT and HR to craft a vision of a simple but flexible self-service experience backed by a powerful integration solution based on Microsoft and partner products.

Naresh D. Koka of MPS Partners worked directly with the SAP Functional Lead to prove out this new approach. Through a series of Architecture Design Sessions, onsite training, and detailed testing, the new Microsoft based solution was shown to perform significantly better than the competition from SAP and also proved much easier to manage and deploy. Most importantly, Microsoft’s rich set of development tools makes it possible to offer their managers a simple, flexible user experience while also dramatically improving their own developer productivity. Java based solution from SAP and its partner Adobe were considered but ultimately found to be lacking when compared to our combination of power, performance and price.

The Client has begun a complete architecture, design and implementation of their solution based on Microsoft SharePoint 2007, InfoPath 2007, Silverlight, Sitrion Universal Approval and Sitrion Service Studio to power their entire suite of next generation Manager Self-Service offerings. On completion of this solution Takeda will also be pursuing an initiative to convert their legacy Employee Self-Service suite to the new architecture over the coming years!!