Riordan Manufacturing - Hris Analysis and Upgrade

Riordan Manufacturing, founded in 1991, is a plastic injection molding company with four facilities across the United States and China. The production facilities consist of Albany, Georgia, which produces plastic beverage containers, Pontiac, Michigan, which produces custom plastic parts, and Hangzhou, China, which produces plastic fan parts. In San Jose, California, the fourth branch of the company is the main headquarters as well as the Research and Development (R&D) facility. Employing over 550 people with expected earnings to top $46 million this year Riordan Manufacturing has been very successful as well as being in the rankings of Fortune 1000 enterprises.

Riordan Manufacturing has had a Human Resource Information System (HRIS) in place for about 15 years. The company’s HRIS system was brought into effect in 1992, is a part of the financial systems package, and keeps track of employee information. Personal information such as names, addresses, marital status, birth dates, and hire dates. It also includes pay rate personal exemptions for tax purposes, hire date, seniority date (which is always different from the hire date), organizational information, department, (for budget purposes) manager’s name, and vacation hours for non-exempt employees. If changes occur to any of the previously mentioned information, the changes are manual, hand-written forms and are being submitted by line management. Once they are received, they are entered into the system manually by the payroll clerk. Excel spreadsheets are also being relied upon heavily for recording training of employees as well as for tracking results for surveys, analyses, and compensation decisions.

A service request was received from COO Hugh McCauley, SR-RM-022, which requested a review of the current HRIS system and its processes. This request is requesting that all applications and processes be brought together to function as a single entity to help improve business flow and productivity. Riordan has had the current system in place for about 15 years, which is pushing for this upgrade. With the improvements to the system, production will be increased as well as business processes streamlined. Throughout this document, the project details will be presented for review and approval.

Project Scope

In order for this to be a success, we are in need of a strong project scope. The project scope is the definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish and the budget of both time and money that has been created to achieve these objectives. Mochal(2004), "Defining scope is perhaps the most important part of the upfront process of defining a project. In fact, if you do not know for sure what you are delivering and what the boundaries of the project are, you have no chance for success. Managing scope is one of the most critical aspects of managing a project.” (para. 2). Since the scope of the project is