U.K.'s Royal Mail boosts HR efficiency - US company Software 2000 wins contract for human resource software for the UK's Royal Mail letter delivery branch of the post office

Software Magazine, April, 1993 by George Black

U.S firm displaces U.K. suppliers on strength of database structure

British developers of human resource software have had to rethink their position since losing the Royal Mail contract to a U.S. rival.

The $3.2 million contract with Royal Mail, the letter delivery branch of the British government-owned post office, was the first win outside the United States for Software 2000, Hyannis, Mass.

Peterborough Software, Peterborough, England, found this decision devastating. Not only did Peterborough dominate the British domestic market for payroll and personnel systems, it was also the front-runner for the Royal Mail job.

The contract was fiercely contested because the post office is one of the largest, most visible public sector organizations in the U.K.

Royal Mail was looking for the supplier with the best integrated payroll and personnel software to cope with its 160,000 employees across the country. Since Software 2000 won the bid, Peterborough and other British vendors have been reviewing their strategies to try to withstand incursions by U.S. suppliers.

Peterborough's Unipay and Unipersonnel systems are set for a complete overhaul, and there is now talk in the firm of "a phoenix rising from the ashes."

Local suppliers of human resource software have clear advantages from such variables as currency, sick-pay arrangements and payday conventions.

But inherent technical factors can outweigh advantages based on local knowledge. For Royal Mail, the superior relational database design of Software 2000's product proved more important than these other issues.

"I was ridiculed by some people for picking a system that dealt in dollars and did not do U.K. statutory sick-pay calculations," said the Royal Mail's Project Controller John Harriman. "But for me the database structure was paramount."

Harriman was convinced that organizing applications around a single relational database was the answer. By inputting data only once and maintaining it in one place, the mail service could improve productivity and reduce duplication efforts.

Like many U.K. public bodies, Royal Mail was behind time without a centralized system. When it decided to modernize, each of its 64 districts ran an independent system. Payroll and personnel operated as separate entities and ran on outdated equipment from Burroughs (now Unisys Corp., Blue Bell, Pa.) and NCR Corp., Dayton, Ohio.

For years, managers found it almost impossible to get information about its employees across the whole firm. In the mid-1980s, Royal Mail chose IBM's System/38 as its standard midrange machine. It later upgraded to the AS/400, the machine that would house Harriman's integrated payroll and personnel system.

In constructing the system, Harriman's aim was to match the detailed logical design he had used to create the application's source code. To do this, he used the Information Engineering Facility computer-aided software engineering (Case) tool from James Martin Associates, now owned by Texas Instruments, Plano, Texas.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

Harriman first considered inhouse development, which would have meant modifying the Burroughs programs. His team would have had to port the programs to the AS/400, integrate them with the personnel programs and add database capability. He ruled out this approach as costly and risky.

He then turned his attention to relational database programs from suppliers of human resource system. He finally narrowed down his list to 12 suppliers, among them Software 2000; Cyborg Systems, Inc., Chicago; Peterborough Software; Hoskyns, London; MSA, now Dun & Bradstreet Software Services, Atlanta; Midland Software, Nottinghamshire, England; and McDonnell Douglas Information Systems International, Hazelwood, Mo.

When he investigated these packages, Harriman found that most did not offer a relational database structure. If they did, the database either was not fully integrated or not designed to run on the AS/400, said Harriman. Systems from Software 2000, Cyborg and Peterborough seemed to offer the best solutions.

An important factor in Harriman's decision was a fundamental characteristic of most relational databases: In general, they do not handle batch processing very well, such as for payroll applications. A relational database approach meant the system was bound to be heavy on machine resources and likely to respond slowly when under pressure.

Speed of response was crucial because Royal Mail pays most of its staff for the current week, instead of a week in arrears. Personnel completes details of hours worked on Monday for the pay run on Wednesday, so time is very tight.

This meant the application had to run in virtually native mode for better efficiency. Any software or middleware between the operating system and the applications would have created an intolerable burden.

After considering all these issues, Harriman chose the Software 2000 Human Resources 2000 Series. Originally designed for the System/38, it was relatively easy to upgrade to the AS/400. Its database design provided flexibility for application development, and Software 2000 had thoroughly translated the product for the U.K. market.