Online HR Information System

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:///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