Charisma HR - an information system to keep Carrefour in a continuous expansion

The company
Carrefour Romania, one of the biggest employers in the FMCG & retail sector on a national level, with more than 8800 employees, is present in 14 cities around the country and is targeting end consumers via 25 supermarkets and 22 hypermarkets. Carrefour is part of the French group with the same name, carrying out activities in 35 countries around the world, being on the 1st place in Europe and on the 2nd place worldwide in retail market. The group has 500,000 employees and has reached a total turnover of EUR 108,629 billion in 2008.


The situation
By opening several stores around the country and quickly increasing the number of employees in a relatively short time, the accelerated company development process was raising problems regarding the management of human resources and payroll in a consistent manner.

The problems were therefore of an administrative nature, mainly generated by the lack of a database common to all stores, that would allow real time access to information for all the people involved in this activity, regardless of their location. Hence other problems, such as the impossibility to conduct reports regarding the situation of human resources or payroll that reflect the activity in Romania.

Moreover, the large number of employees was generating a huge volume of documents that required a larger and larger archiving space. Responding to employees' requests was more difficult and was wasting a lot of time due to operations such as searching, copying and weekly transmitting facsimiles of approx. 150-200 pages towards all the stores.    


The Solution
During 2003, Carrefour has launched a market analysis to find a software solution capable of supporting a rapidly growing business. After a careful analysis of the software solutions available in Romania, Carrefour has chosen Charisma HR as the most flexible and easy to use platform, suited for getting real time information.

One of the project challenges was integrating all staff information within one database that would quickly provide information regarding the human resource situation, regardless of the location. Information regarding the assessments, the currencies, the performance and the evolution of the employees has been integrated so that the company would have a decisional basis regarding the job position changes within the company.

Unifying all this data led to the possibility of diversifying the reports necessary for a results-based management.  By automating processes and the possibility of adapting reports according to their needs, significant time and human resources savings, which were necessary to support HR & Payroll operations, have also been achieved.

At the end of 2009, the project has been extended with a document management solution that manages 250,000 documents at the moment, of which approx. 50,000 pages are work permits. After this implementation, each Carrefour Romania employee is assigned, via Charisma HR, an electronic folder, containing all of his/her documents.


The results
By using the document management solution, what has been achieved was decreasing the time of response for employee requests, from one week to a single day, and thus the capacity to transmit the response right away. The effort of headquarters HR team members, necessary for searching, copying and weekly transmitting facsimiles of approx. 150-200 pages towards all the stores has been significantly reduced.  

"We consider that we have achieved our target, i.e. having an online database which is unique for all our stores, containing all the information required for human resources, payroll and timesheet. As a major benefit, we have to mention the possibility of continuously developing and adapting the program to our specific needs" said Ana Dumitru, HR Manager at Carrefour Romania.

Case study revised in 2005.