Online HR Information System

OrangeHRM is an Open Source HR information system that keeps employee related information in a centralized, online database. You can generate literally any kind of report by applying vivid search criteria

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Human Resource Management is one of the key activities of any organization. Hiring the right person for a job has always been a challenge. So, to ensure longevity of an employee, efficient management of human resources goes a long way. A well-managed manpower ultimately leads to an improvement in performance of an organization. Traditionally, HR managers maintained employee data such as qualifications, pay grade, department, work experience, skills, location, last promotion, etc in Excel sheets. Maintaining such kind of data is quite monotonous and boring, with an associated risk of mistakes while updating such sheets.

Applies To: HR managers USP: Maintaining employee details online Primary Link: http://orangehrm.com Google Keywords: HR Information system

Such mistakes can be minimized through an online HR Information System. Online systems are designed to be flexible and transparent amongst HR managers and top management, so that they can quickly view and update employee status according to organization hierarchy. OrangeHRM is one such system that provides online HR Information to manage employee database. It's an Open Source solution, developed in PHP and MySQL, and can very easily be deployed in both Windows and Linux. You can download it from http://orangehrm.com. All you need is a Web server running Apache and MySQL database on your OS.

Installation
In our setup, we used a Windows platform. For getting Apache Web server and MySQL functionality, we used EasyPHP, which provides pre-configured Apache and MySQL, rolled in one. You can download EasyPHP from http://easyphp.org. Once you've downloaded the OrangeHRM, extract ZIP file to your Web server's www root folder. If you're using Windows with easyPHP, then your www root will be C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-8\www. On Linux, the location of www root is var/www/ HTML. After this open a Web browser and enter the URL http://127.0. 0.1/orangehrm/.

This tool can be installed in a hassle-free manner through a Web-based wizard. Before installation, it checks for the required components

This will open a Web page, that checks required components on your system. If any component is missing then the installer gives information about the missing component. Once it has checked all the components on a system, the software guides you in setting up the orangeHRM package on that machine. The installer will take you though a wizard to install the entire solution, which includes creating the database, setting up of admin username and password, thus completing the installation process.

Using OrangeHRM
After installation, it's time to use it online. Users can access this system remotely using a Web browser. For this, open the browser window and point it toward your Web server running OrangeHRM, for example http://<IP Address>/orangehrm/. You will get a login page, wherein provide admin as username and give the associated password that you set up during installation. In the first page, you will see three modules: Admin, PIM and Report. The Admin module takes care about HR tasks such as defining company structure, pay grades and other information that serves as the backbone for the rest of the system. Security issues are also taken care of through this module as well as by defining user rights and groups. PIM module is the core module that maintains all employee related information such as qualifications, work experience, skills, etc. A picture of an employee is also stored along with this data. Information stored in this module is utilized by other modules, eliminating data redundancy.

A Web-based data entry interface allows an HR manager to collect various kinds of employee data

The Report module produces customized reports, containing employee details, according to an HR manager's needs. You can define a large number of reports by selecting from a range of search criteria and report fields. Report definitions can be saved to avoid repeating this task. Once a report definition is saved, the report can be generated by providing data matching the required criteria. There's another tool, PIM for other users (designed for users other than HR managers), that provides employees with the facility to view relevant information and allows them to update personal information online without bothering the HR staff. The same functionality spans through the entire system, making information available anywhere, anytime.

We evaluated this tool by asking our HR manager to work on it. She appreciated it for maintaining all employee details in an online database. But all this is just a small portion of HR management.

No HR system is complete without a module facilitating appraisals. Plus, the system should also allow a comparative analysis of salaries and work experience across the organization. This would for example, help the HR manager in making salary offer to a fresh candidate. Barring such deficiencies, it's overall a useful HR information system.

Sanjay Majumder with inputs from Saswati Sinha

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