Charisma HCM supports Dona pharmacy chain

Company

Dona pharmacy chain is one of the top three drug retailers in Romania. The company has been active on the market since 1993 and today includes 200 pharmacies, more than 1,600 employees and a turnover of over 142 million euro. The main objective of the company is to continuously improve the quality of its services delivered to over 900,000 patients per month.

 

Dona brand is differentiated by the high quality medical services provided to its patients through a pharmacy concept based on the promotion of several products. Thus, besides classic “medicines” (over 7000), the company offers its clients a wide range of cosmetics, dermatological, baby, dietary supplements or and sanitary products.

 

Situation

The decision to implement a new HR&Payroll software occurred late last year amid the increasing number of pharmacies, the dynamics of staff and, last but not least, the need to reduce the effort wasted on redundant activities (payroll, accounting, bonuses management, performance analysis and reporting, etc.).

 

“We have been looking for a stable and complex tool that could better support us in terms of operational activities by automating them and by modeling our human resources processes, including human capital development. Once Charisma was implemented, the problems faced by the HR department got solved; moreover, they also started to benefit from a tool able to support the increasing number of employees.” Stated Maria Comsa, HR Manager, Dona Pharmacies. 

 

At the moment, the payroll activities for 1,300 employees were incurring large time and human resources costs. In addition, “the lack of a solution able to manage the recruitment and evaluation processes” burdened considerably the HR department’s work.

 

Solution

Charisma HCM was chosen based on the solution’s compliance to several technical and performance requirements, as well as based on TotalSoft’s references and recommendations.

 

Charisma HCM covers both the payroll activity and the human resource management one; in addition, it provides distinct modules aimed at supporting the communication with field workers (HCM Portal), training and performance management (Talent Management), as well as tracking employees against overheads.

 

The implementation started in January 2011; however, Charisma was exclusively used only starting with February. Switching to TotalSoft’s solution coincided with a major legislative change, Statement 112, which had quite an impact among all companies in Romania. The company passed well above this challenge, TotalSoft’s specialists’ involvement decreasing the pressure of the moment.

 

Results

With the completion of the implementation, Charisma provided viable solutions to areas previously not covered, or minimally covered by the old application. Thus, the flexibility of the solution allowed users to quick and easy retrieve the information of interest in the form of various reports and without the intervention of IT specialists.

 

The salary calculation time was reduced to only two days and will fall further after the implementation of HCM Portal module, which allows the automatic transmission and retrieval of all employees’ timesheets.

 

“I haven’t been involved that much in the payroll activity, lately since it has been very much relieved and finally stopped being so stressful.”

Also, monthly bonus calculation time was reduced from 2 days to 2 hours and the activity is now performed by one employee, instead of two or many as they were needed before, since it now comes down only to importing an Excel file.

 

In addition, Charisma HCM allows the HR department to keep open several months, thus having the possibility of adjusting and correcting data, which does not affect the payroll calculation or the general HR activity. “In Charisma we can set changes in salaries to become active at a certain time or to enter sick leave requests for the coming months. Achieving these activities without being conditioned by the current month very much helps us relieve the department activity.”

 

Another novelty brought by Charisma in human resource management activities and payroll calculation is the traceability of employees on cost centers, the company thus having a complete overview of all costs incurred by staff.

 

The next step is to implement integrate the HR solution with Charisma ERP system. At the end of this project, the financial-accounting activities, specific to the company’s headquarters and the retail ones, specific to pharmacies will be covered.

 

Case study revised in 2011.