Charisma HCM provides a human resources management solution for the Romanian Villeroy & Boch subsidiary

Company
Mondial Lugoj is a company producing sanitary ware, with a 40 years tradition and an internationally appreciated product portfolio. In 1996, Mondial Lugoj was purchased by the German concern, Villeroy & Boch AG, which took over the majority stake, turning the Romanian manufacturer into the largest production unit of the group, together with a factory in Hungary. Thus, Mondial has reached a turnover of 26 million EUR, a total number of 850 employees and a production line with 100.000 pieces capacity per month.

Since 1996, Villeroy & Boch AG has invested heavily in the Lugoj enterprise development. The main investments were focused on the production of sanitary porcelain, where the manufacturing technology has been 90% modified since its purchase. Investments were also made in the infrastructure software, choosing the SAP solution for the financial-accounting activity management. In parallel with the investment, a transfer of specialized knowledge was performed, including permanent training for employees at regional and international level.


Situation
In 2008, the HR processes revision and modernization started together with an analysis of the manner in which specific activities of the department were conducted. The information system of the company was also evaluated – it comprised an in-house software solution that covered only the payroll activity. The payroll process required the effort of four people and lasted for two days, during which they were working exclusively for the payroll calculation and being responsible for the salaries of several hundreds of people. The next step consisted in strengthening the information obtained, leading thus to frequent situations when overtime work was necessary to complete tasks on time.

The information on human resources was managed through an excel file, from which monthly data was extracted to be further manually filled in a standard reporting form, requested by the German headquarters. Under these conditions, although the report was brief and the information was strictly limited to employees’ numeric records, large amounts of time were lost with its completion and verification.

It was then decided to purchase a specialized HR & Payroll software solution in order to remove all these flaws. The system acquisition process followed three clear criteria: the new software had to unite into a single database the payroll calculation and HR activities, to sustain the creation of a complex database containing complete information about the company’s employees and to provide an integration interface with the SAP system used for reporting activities at group level.

“Considering the special requirements of Villeroy &Boch, we had to ensure that no problem could arise from the implementation of a Romanian application. By choosing Charisma HCM, we ensured that all pre-established criteria were met, especially considering that TotalSoft’s application already had an interface with SAP; also, from a financial standpoint we benefited from the best quality-price ratio” states Mihaela Daniela Nagy – HR Manager at Mondial SA.


Solution
Charisma HCM implementation at Mondial has been a real challenge for both teams, as the company is operating on a continuous basis, this aspect being reflected in a number of specific timesheets and salary calculation items. For example, the payroll calculation is performed according to several categories: employees who work under individual agreements, employees who are paid according to the number of hours worked or employees paid under a negotiated fixed salary. All these exceptions had to be developed and integrated into Charisma.

“We have also integrated features for the calculation of performance and quality bonuses, so as to quickly dispose of such information in a centralized manner by a single click in the system” states Mrs. Nagy.

Charisma HCM, besides being adapted to Mondial specificity, also includes an access-timesheet module, which will provide, from January 2011, the timesheet information necessary to calculate salaries, as well as training, audit and recruitment modules. TotalSoft’s solution provides thus great control over HR processes and data accuracy, the possibility to define control keys for each step of the process and the afferent responsible.


Results
An important benefit obtained from implementing the solution was seen in carrying out the salary calculation:
“By using Charisma things just got simpler, clearer and transparent; we have eliminated the large job needed for closing each month, managing to use human involvement only for checking control keys, while the reports to headquarters could be as complex as necessary.” states Mrs. Nagy.

Another notable achievement was Charisma’s integration with SAP, the cost activities being now automatically exported from one application to another. In addition, TotalSoft is currently working to achieve an interface with Global HR, the HR solution used at group level, which aims to create a unified database for 9800 employees. When this project completes, Charisma will be able to retrieve real-time data, without any local intervention. It will eliminate time consuming activities that still require much attention.

By comparing the requirements to the benefits obtained, we have concluded that the objectives have been met and that Mondial has created a solution with a HR database so detailed that “if we want to, we can even find out the shoes number of our employees” as the HR manager states half joking, half seriously.