IBM UK uses Liferay DXP to make essential NHS HR System resources easily accessible for 1.9 million NHS users across 300+ trusts while maintaining key legacy investments.
How the NHS Electronic Staff Record Refined the Employee Experience with Liferay
1.9M+
users
300+
NHS organizations in England and Wales
50%
traffic decrease to servers
Outline
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Key Takeaways
- Focus on how users access your solution when you make improvements over time. By analyzing user behavior and identifying the most frequent touchpoints, the team can optimize the system to enhance the user experience.
- Improve efficiency for internal teams with the right CMS capabilities. Liferay DXP’s business user-friendly CMS enables non-developers to add, edit, and publish content independently.
- Keep crucial tech investments while improving the user experience. Liferay DXP’s platform flexibility allows the NHS to continue using their legacy system, but with a more modern look and feel and overall experience for specific touchpoints.
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Challenges
The NHS has been using and evolving their HR & Payroll System NHS Electronic Staff Record - ‘ESR’) with Liferay technology for ten years.
Before Liferay, the NHS had built NHS ESR on a powerful ERP system - Oracle eBusiness Suite. In 2014, IBM and the NHS agreed to leverage Liferay DXP to enhance the user experience by providing a ‘Portal” access point for all users. This was focused on addressing and/or supporting:
- A legacy user interface. The system’s look and feel required an update, and, more importantly, employees had trouble finding resources.
- Accessibility challenges and opportunities. Adherence to accessibility standards would directly support diverse workforce needs.
- Slow content publication and update processes. The system’s content capabilities were limited, making asset creation, management, and updates a time-consuming process that drained technical resources.
Implementation
The NHS tasked implementation partner IBM UK with finding a solution that would allow them to continue using and hosting data in their existing ERP system while improving the overall experience of employees as well as site and content managers.
As a proponent of open-source technology, Liferay appealed to IBM UK. Liferay offers a flexible platform for content management with additional native capabilities like enhanced search, responsive design, and personalization.
Liferay’s flexibility was crucial during the initial implementation phase as well as during multiple upgrades to newer Liferay versions later: to ensure a seamless experience, the solution was designed to enable users to access their HR services either through Liferay or the existing system. Flexibility has also proved important for general development, as IBM UK has tailored NHS ESR to very specific requirements.
Serving 1.9 million employees across 300+ individual NHS organizations that correlate to the NHS’s trusts (or hospitals), NHS ESR is the one system that every single trust employee accesses.
In order to encourage adoption of the new Liferay solution, IBM UK took a phased approach. They initially rolled out a basic framework and gradually added new features over time, enabling a strategy of showcasing the value to employees without deluging them all at once with too many things to learn.
As a proponent of open-source technology, Liferay appealed to IBM UK. Liferay offers a flexible platform for content management with additional native capabilities like enhanced search, responsive design, and personalization.
Liferay’s flexibility was crucial during the initial implementation phase as well as during multiple upgrades to newer Liferay versions later: to ensure a seamless experience, the solution was designed to enable users to access their HR services either through Liferay or the existing system. Flexibility has also proved important for general development, as IBM UK has tailored NHS ESR to very specific requirements.
Serving 1.9 million employees across 300+ individual NHS organizations that correlate to the NHS’s trusts (or hospitals), NHS ESR is the one system that every single trust employee accesses.
In order to encourage adoption of the new Liferay solution, IBM UK took a phased approach. They initially rolled out a basic framework and gradually added new features over time, enabling a strategy of showcasing the value to employees without deluging them all at once with too many things to learn.
Key Features
The Liferay DXP-powered solution leverages several key features to meet specific requirements:
- Web Content Management (WCM): Leveraging various structures and templates helps the team manage and deliver content effectively.
- Application Display Templates (ADT): The system’s flexible templates present assets in specific formats, customizing the user experience.
- Single Sign-On (SSO): A unified authentication process enables seamless login for all device types across all applications, increasing the system’s convenience.
- Content Targeting: Personalized delivery ensures specific content reaches designated roles, so employees see only relevant information.
- Responsive Design: Employees can view NHS ESR optimally on any device.
- Liferay Scheduler: This feature automates administrative tasks, improving efficiency and reducing manual effort.
How Users Access the Solution
The system has been designed around how users typically interact with it using insights gathered in Liferay DXP. This enabled the team to update the system to make the most common activities for employees - such as logging in to view pay slips or book annual leave - more prominent and easy to access.
NHS ESR’s 1.9 million users can be organized into three categories:
NHS ESR’s 1.9 million users can be organized into three categories:
- NHS Employees: NHS employees include staff members spanning various roles and professions. They use NHS ESR, via self-service access, for tasks like viewing and updating their personal information, requesting leave, and accessing pay slips.
- Managers: Managers leverage the system to manage their teams, including approval of leave requests, reviewing performance data, and carrying out other responsibilities - again, via self-service access.
- Professional Users: Including HR professionals, payroll specialists, and other administrative staff, these users access NHS ESR via tailored professional user access rights to manage a number of HR-specific processes, including Payroll processing, generating reports, Learning Management, and ensuring compliance with regulations.
Results
Having successfully empowered employees for ten years, here are just a few of the many benefits the solution has reaped for the NHS:
- Improved user experiences. Liferay DXP’s intuitive UI and rich features have made it easier for employees to access and complete HR-related tasks.
- Increased efficiency with unified access. The NHS ESR system serves as a centralized platform for Employee, Manager, and other Professional User services. The Liferay Portal implementation offers a unified entry point, allowing all users to easily access and browse various portal screens.
- Enhanced convenience via mobile accessibility. Employees can access the system on the go from any device.
- Faster time to market. Business users can update and upload documents easily, requiring less IT intervention.
- Stronger security. Liferay DXP’s security capabilities integrated into the wider security of ESR protect sensitive employee data to align with data privacy regulations.
- 50% decrease in web traffic load. Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) has significantly decreased web traffic to the data center, effectively boosting capacity without requiring any infrastructure changes.
Future Plans
The IBM UK team is currently reviewing the latest version of Liferay DXP to assess how the new content management and content richness can benefit the NHS and continue to make accessibility easier.
About the Technology Partner
IBM UK is a leading technology company that provides a wide range of solutions and services to businesses and organizations across the United Kingdom. As part of the global IBM corporation, IBM UK leverages its expertise in artificial intelligence, automation, and hybrid cloud to help clients address their most pressing challenges.
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