Building relationships, saving time, and improving process flows with Cezanne’s HR software
We recently spoke with Lizanne, HR Business Partner at PRMA (now part of Avalere Health) who ‘enable faster patient access to therapies that improve health outcomes’. We wanted to better understand how Cezanne is helping her meet PRMA’s HR needs, as well as supporting her in building relationships with other departments by providing important business insights ‘at the press of a button’.
How has Cezanne’s HR software supported you in building HR’s credibility in your business?
When I began at PRMA, I was starting a new role, in a new country (I’d not long before moved to the UK), and learning an HRIS that was also new to me. I was keen to build relationships across the business, and to ensure our small HR team didn’t get bogged down with admin or system management. My attitude from day one has been to use the system to its fullest capabilities, and I’m pleased to say it has met my needs and then some!
With the help of the Cezanne support team, I quickly learnt the system and how we could be making better use of the software.
My vision was to use Cezanne for more than just reporting and storing employee data – I wanted to promote self service as much as possible. I believe that logging leave requests or updating personal details on an HR system should be very quick for employees. Having Cezanne reassures our workforce that we, their HR team, understand their time is precious, and that we can keep up with the pace of the wider business.
From experience, I also know how crucial it is to have an HR system that can fulfil important, time-sensitive C-suite requests. Just recently, another department’s director asked me for a new set of reports at short notice – half an hour after the request was made, I was able to provide him with all the information he needed via Cezanne’s reporting functionality. It can’t be underestimated how important being able to provide this level of service is to our business and HR’s reputation in it.
How does Cezanne save you time?
Our business is incredibly fast paced. If I want HR to be taken seriously and for the organisation to engage with us, I need to stay up to speed. Cezanne has dramatically cut the time it takes us to manage essential processes.
The Cezanne HR Performance Management module has been very important in saving time – we run all our performance management through Cezanne. By automating our processes, the module helps me maintain my relationships in the business with answers to performance-related queries, including compensation and benefits, within easy reach. As a super user, I have full visibility so I can respond to questions very quickly.
In addition to this, I’ve been impressed with the system’s ability to share reports with stakeholders, even if I’m on leave. I simply set up the desired reports to be delivered directly to the business as needed.
As I’ve mentioned, self-service is also very important to us. We also promote the system on our intranet and provide our workforce with user guides and videos to give them the tools they need to use Cezanne efficiently.
I don’t get any complaints from people about not being able to do things in the system; this is great because we’ve grown a lot over the last year, so I need a system that enables staff to be self sufficient. By giving employees and line managers access to the data they need, and making approval processes easy to manage, we save a lot of time for HR and the business alike.
What other benefits have you seen?
Our business goes through an annual HR policy review, and there are a lot of policies to manage! Cezanne has helped reduce the amount of time it takes to review and then distribute our policies. We can quickly share HR policies with the relevant stakeholders, gain their feedback and sign off, and then send them out to the business.
We recently looked at how we administer these policies, in terms of sharing them and recording staff acknowledgement. Now, instead of sending them all out at once, we stagger it to a policy every 2 weeks. We use Cezanne to communicate with our staff why they’re receiving the policy, to send reminders out about what action they need to take, and to then track who has read and signed the policy acknowledgement. The ease with which the system manages this process for our business has been excellent, and it makes it easy for me to delegate overseeing the process to a colleague if I need to, too.
We also use Cezanne’s document management functionality to ease the admin burden of onboarding. We run a highly organised two-week programme, with new hires understanding what to expect before their first day. We’re also exploring Cezanne HR’s Onboarding module to see how this can enhance our programme.
What has been your experience of Cezanne’s customer support?
When I started using Cezanne (which was already in place when I joined PRMA) as a complete novice to the software, I was impressed that our HR business processes never slowed down as a result of my being new to the system. I firmly believe that this is down to the great customer support that I received as well as the quality of the software.
After I agreed priorities for how we were going to extend our use of Cezanne within my team, Cezanne support met with me and my HR colleagues to understand our requirements, then everything was implemented within a matter of weeks. It was all so smooth – I didn’t have to chase anyone for help, and all the support team members were very responsive. It has always been an absolute pleasure to work with Cezanne HR.
I’ve also been very happy with the resources available to help me out of hours. I’ve been able to refer to Cezanne’s support portal and documented guidance for help.
The high level of support that Cezanne provides makes me feel like they’ve really got my back, and with the year we’ve had so far with COVID-19, I can’t understate how important that has been for me and our team.
A final word on the new user interface
It’s early days for me with the new user interface, but after using it for 2 weeks, I definitely like it. It feels new and more modern looking. I haven’t lost anything, and I’ve been able to pull all my reports as I’ve needed them. I’ve also shared the information, including videos, that Cezanne has provided for line managers and self-service users with my business to bring them up to speed.
