ESR Business Intelligence (ESR BI) transforms your ESR data into visually relevant and appealing dashboards, accessible on desktops or mobile devices.  It contains a full suite of standard reports across the full range of functionality that ESR provides; enabling processes to be monitored and provides an opportunity to empower management with valuable workforce intelligence in a variety of forms to suit the user. It offers detailed business insight for managers to monitor their teams while directors, and senior managers and leadership teams get an effective overview of the entire organisation, allowing them to plan for future business development.

ESR BI can also be used to produce integrated reports with specific data from other systems, and bespoke reports can be uploaded to the ESR Portal, to ensure that the target audience has quick access to information. Benchmarking and alerting are also key parts of ESR BI enabling the ability to target users and encourage prompt action where required.

Benefits include:

• A suite of standard dashboards easily accessible thus reducing the reliance on centralised reporting
• Interactive dashboards allowing users to delve deeper behind the graphs to see the data that sits behind them, thus saving time from producing data in more than one level
• Easy to use standard dashboards resulting in less time spent educating users
• Greater understanding of data and workforce requirements at source
• Improved timeliness of reports resulting in less time spent waiting for reports to complete
• Reports can be exported into many different formats including PDF & Excel
• Improved data quality and accuracy
• Ownership of data at source

Workforce information is available through the ESR Portal and its associated Dashboards to your managers and your back office functions, providing an opportunity to empower management with valuable workforce intelligence in a variety of forms to suit the user. It offers detailed business insight for managers to monitor their teams while directors, and senior managers and leadership teams get an effective overview of the entire organisation, allowing them to plan for future business development.

ESR BI can also be used to produce integrated reports with specific data from other systems, and bespoke reports can be uploaded to the ESR Portal, to ensure that the target audience has quick access to information. Benchmarking and alerting are also key parts of ESR BI enabling the ability to target users and encourage prompt action where required.

Benefits include:

• Manager dashboard with direct links to these areas and the ESR BI reports directly from the Portlets, thus reducing the reliance on centralised reporting
• Interactive dashboards allowing users to delve deeper behind the graphs to see the data that sits behind them, thus saving time from producing data in more than one level
• Greater understanding of data and workforce requirements at source
• Empower your managers to have greater control of their workforce data and targets
• Improved timeliness of reports resulting in less time spent waiting for reports to complete
• Reports can be exported into many different formats including PDF & Excel
• Ownership of data at source
• View key performance indicators for absence, compliance, and appraisals and the ability to access key career information about their employees through the Talent Profile with the ability to produce PDF reports

Effective Establishment Control, along with good workstructures management ensures your organisation’ position hierarchy in ESR is reconciled with the general ledger and critically, the Full Time Equivalent (FTE) values are routinely maintained in synchronicity. This in turn ensures appointments are only made to an established post with funding and an authorisation to recruit. Good workstructures management is not only essential for managing your workforce establishment, but is also an important part of ensuring data quality to enable you to provide effective workforce reporting at local and national levels. For further information on how ESR supports the recommendations outlined in the Carter Review click here.

FTE costing data held against the workforce positions as set-up in ESR can provide valuable information for organisations that are proactively managing their workforce requirements and associated staffing costs. Full utilisation of Establishment Control mechanism in ESR, as recommended by the Carter review, can significantly reduce the time that organisations spend reconciling their financial ledger with ESR whilst providing greater integrity of the recruitment process.

Benefits:

• Ability to monitor and report on vacancies accurately through the use of Establishment Control through ESR BI, providing quick and easy identification of the true vacancy rate.
• Can prevent over recruiting
• The accurate maintenance of ESR workstructures allows other areas of ESR to be correctly reported and processed, such as sickness reporting and competency requirements
• Employees will always report into the right cost centres with correct procedures in place

ESR allows staff absence to be recorded, monitored and managed with the associated payments and entitlements being processed automatically.

Recording, monitoring and managing the times when your staff are away from work – including sickness, annual leave, special leave and maternity leave within ESR via Self Service or through the core solution means every aspect of calculation of entitlements and payment to employees is processed automatically, whilst minimising the amount of data entry needed.  This is supported by a wide range of reports accessible via Business Intelligence (BI) or via the absence portlet in the Managers Dashboard in Self Service, which enables local monitoring of absence by individual, staff group, organisational hierarchy.

Back office improvements in productivity and efficiency can be realised by using ESR best practice processes. Underpinning ESR best practice is the timely population of high quality and validated data at the point of entry. This enables accurate management information to be available across NHS organisations to support business planning and decision making. Fundamental to this principle is the embedding of Self Service for managers and employers, ensuring information is entered in as efficient manner as possible and helping reduce paper based process within organisations.

Furthermore, in light of the publication of the Carter Recommendations (2016), organisations will be required to focus on all aspects of the use of data in their daily management of staff. It is our belief that ESR can support information provision to give timely information in key areas, allow analysis and identify trends, and deliver training and identify gaps in workforce training needs. It is crucial therefore that ESR functionality is utilised and that accurate data is entered into ESR using the recommended HR Best Practice.

HR best practice use of ESR can be found in the document ESR-NHS0078 - HR Best Practice Guide, located on Kbase. The guide details the best practice approach to managing the recruitment and HR processes using the ESR system, including:

• Establishment Control
• Recruitment processes including use of third party e-recruitment systems
• Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) process and data transfer
• New starter process
• Changes to records
• Internal leaver processes
• Terminations
• Re-Hires
• Business Intelligence reports
• Data standards
• Interfaces

Self Service offers organisations a valuable employee engagement tool, in which employees have the capability to interact with their NHS employment records including updating their personal data, viewing pay and benefit (Total Reward Statements) information, and managing their performance, learning and development. It is widely recognised that if staff feel valued and supported in the workplace by their line managers and the organisation as a whole, this further encourages them to deliver a high level of patient care that supports the values of your organisation.  

Self Service provides organisations with the opportunity to reduce costs on administrative based tasks and supports local strategies around compliance, engagement, and wider productivity and efficiency plans. Self Service also supports paperless office strategies – both reducing associated costs and supporting environmental policies.

Information held within ESR is presented to its users in an easy to read, pre-analysed format, in the form of portlets within the portal or as dashboard reports using Business Intelligence (BI). Such data is available at multiple levels across an organisation, including workforce strategic leaders having access to a ‘Management Dashboard – showing graphical data of key performance indicators in near real-time, on desktops or mobile devices.

Organisations have the ability to set Automatic Internet Access for all their workforce, thereby allowing all their ESR users to automatically access their ESR portal remotely, enhancing the usability of ESR and promoting 24/7 access.

Benefits include:

• E-Learning can be completed anywhere and at any time through the ESR Self Service functionality
• OLM supports a blended approach to learning with organisations able to offer in one place, e-Learning and classroom based learning
• Over 800 freely nationally approved, quality assured and centrally maintained e-Learning content as well as access to locally procured or created e-Learning available to play on PCs and mobile devices
• Associate competencies with learning to automatically enrol employees onto learning and update their employee records on successful completion
• Automatic notifications and emails to remind staff and managers when learning needs to be renewed
• Certifications enable staff to view the status of their compliance based learning and see if and when it needs to be renewed
• National competence frameworks including the Core Skills Training Framework (CSTF), Care Certificate Framework (CCF) and an agreed set of Statutory and Mandatory competence labels (MAND) to support monitoring of compliance levels against statutory and mandatory training
• Reduction in staff undertaking unnecessary duplicate learning when transferred using the Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) process
• Reports enable the demonstration of achievement and compliance for all staff within the organisation
• Creation of tests to assess learner understanding, and to provide valuable feedback on whether business goals and workforce objectives are being served

The appraisal functionality available through Employee and Manager Self Service enables an organisation to manage the pay progression and end to end appraisal process online for all their staff.  This includes the ability to access a standard appraisal template or allows the organisation to create a bespoke template using HTML coding. The process includes the reviewing of competencies, objectives setting and enables the electronic transfer of the appraisal between the employee and manager.

Pay Progression

The 2018 framework agreement on the reform of Agenda for Change introduced provisions to move to a new pay system with faster progression to the top of pay bands through fewer pay step points. In response to these new provisions ESR functionality was enhanced to enable managers to undertake pay progression successfully utilising Manager/Supervisor Self Service or via a central function using core form functionality.

For further information download: ESR Supporting AfC Pay Progression

Performance Management Plans

Performance Management Plan functionality works with the appraisal functionality and can be used to ensure that organisational objectives are successfully met, tracking them through the entire workforce hierarchy. The Performance Management Plan Admin URP is used to setup and roll out performance management plans to the entire workforce via Self Service, incorporating objective setting as well as appraisal tasks.
 
The Line of Sight feature is a hierarchical representation of the alignment of objectives in an organisation. This feature displays objectives that are aligned or linked to each other in the objectives hierarchy. Line of Sight helps managers and employees to understand how their objectives have been cascaded down through the organisation and the association between objectives.

The functionality also provides an electronic auditable process for the appraiser to withhold increment progression.

The Talent Management functionality of ESR provides you with the capability to manage and monitor the careers of your employees. ESR maintains the competences, qualifications, and employment of each staff member and enables you to manage their development reviews and learning.

• Through ESR Self Service managers and employees can access their competence profile, qualifications, and learning record, enabling up to date information to be available for local reporting and analysis of training needs
• Complete integration between Oracle Learning Management (OLM), competency functionality and the employee record, enables updates to individual learning and competency records to be maintained easily
• Local and national competence frameworks including Core Skills Training Framework (CSTF), Care Certificate (CCF), Educator (EDU) and an agreed set of Statutory and Mandatory competence labels are built in, and an employee’s record within these is automatically maintained. Each framework is related to an employee’s training record, competency profile and post requirements 
• Every employee’s qualifications can be maintained, including A-Level, degree and post-graduate qualifications as well as Qualification Credit Framework (QCF) information
• The comprehensive reporting suite within ESR allows managers to ensure that the staff development and review process is being maintained, and provides statutory statistical information