Situation

Christchurch Casinos Limited runs the largest casino in the South Island of New Zealand with 36 table games and 500 slot machines and employs approximately 460 staff. The Casino also includes 2 restaurants and 3 bars.

The Casino was significantly impacted by the Christchurch earthquakes and was seeking to ensure they had the appropriate Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) applications in place to capture the right data in order to improve reporting, as well as drive more efficient and effective processes into the organisation.

There was a sense of frustration with some of the current HR systems, especially with business users at the Casino - they weren’t getting what they wanted. There were existing issues that could potentially impact the business so the Casino needed to protect itself by ensuring that all aspects of their HR information were correctly managed.

There was a significant cost to upgrade in order to address some of these issues, so before committing to any additional investments in HR, the Senior Management team wanted to get some clarity on the current state of HRIS capability within the Casino, as well as an understanding of what else was possible in this space. The business needed to understand what was required to future-proof itself – invest further or replace.  

Wendy Clarke, Christchurch Casino's Finance Manager, engaged the services of Montage HRIS to do a HRIS Discovery. “I wanted to understand what was a ‘must have’ from the HR systems and what was ‘nice to have’. We’d partially completed a review but really required an independent person to mediate and manage the process to the end. We had an existing relationship with the Montage team and their experience in the HRIS space made them the logical choice.”

Solution

Montage recommended an HRIS Discovery. The Discovery methodology assesses an organisation on the basis of its People, Process and Technology against the various components of their HRIS applications. The process looked to engage the key stakeholders (8) within the organisation. This meant that everyone had an equal voice in the process and the end result would be something that everyone agreed on. “Montage worked with us to identify the current situation and where we wanted to get to. They were then able to define a roadmap that filled the gap that existed between these two areas.” said Wendy.

Montage was able to independently review and validate all aspects of HRIS within the organisation from Payroll, HR, Rostering, Self-Service and System Integrations. They were able to highlight several key ‘critical success factors’ like reducing manual data entry between systems, increasing current reporting capability and reducing the Casino's reliance on bespoke systems.

“I liked their approach. It was very thorough; they weren’t solely looking at the technology but also the People and Process aspects as well,” said Wendy . “They also dealt with side issues that we wouldn’t have necessarily focused on ourselves and introduced solutions as simple as recommending training, which added value to the overall understanding of what was required to improve our internal HRIS capability.”  

Results

 “The Casino now has an agreed starting point. Montage was able to validate what we were doing right. They identified the areas of improvement and got everyone aligned.” 

Montage presented the Christchurch Casino with a HRIS Discovery Document which provided not only independent recommendations and advice, but also validated what the Casino was doing right. They identified areas of improvement and provided a detailed Roadmap which got everyone aligned and on the same page.   “We now have a working document that we could pick up and run with. Previously we’d have run around to get consensus across the departments,” said Wendy.

The decision to invest in a review process is never taken lightly. There is always a feeling that the money could be used to fix problems and there is always the uncertainty of the actual benefits such a process will deliver. “The Casino has been impressed with the final discovery document and how it has been received within the organisation. We now have a clear Roadmap that everybody has bought into. The investment made in the process has saved us time and effort in the long run as we don’t have to keep having department meetings to confirm next steps as the plan is already laid out. From a CFO perspective, it means I can manage the investment, there are no surprises.”  

Future

“We are all on-board. We know what is required from an HRIS perspective to future proof our business. It’s now easy to pick up from where we left off because we have a working document (Roadmap) that everyone has agreed to.”