Field Fisher Waterhouse
Cascade HR helps streamline FFW's HR processes and procedures by introducing Cascade’s .NET HR solution.
FFW Overview
Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP (FFW) are a leading European law firm with over 130 partners, over 230 other lawyers and over 300 support staff. FFW have offices in Brussels, Hamburg, London and Paris and exclusive relationships with Spanish firm Jimenez de Parga and Italian firm, La Scala. FFW's main areas of practice are corporate and commercial, IP and technology, banking and finance, regulatory and real estate with particular expertise in competition & EU law, dispute resolution, employment and tax. The firm holds sector prominence in media, technology & telecoms, retail, life sciences & healthcare, hotels & leisure, energy, transport, sports, central government and public regulatory bodies. The firm combines in-depth industry expertise with an international client base (including listed and unlisted companies, multinationals, banks and other financial institutions, professional partnerships, trade associations and Government departments).
Summary Pre Cascade
The firm’s previous HR system was installed when the firm was a lot smaller and the internal development of the system did not grow with the firm. In addition, the issues with the system were further compounded as we were on an old version that was cumbersome to use and was missing some key processes. The old system had no electronic workflows defined, causing some data consistency issues.
Our IT Department created a very basic Self Service offering for employees but this bespoke solution meant that important processes such as holiday booking and sickness recording were all still paper processes. These paper processes were extremely time-consuming for both the end employees, managers and HR staff. High levels of administrative support were also required to maintain data input for new joiners, changes to records and employee queries.
The Challenge
Following on from the decision to implement a new HR system, a project team was formed consisting of members of the HR & IT Departments. Our in-house IT Business Analyst was given the task to investigate our current product and to discover our requirements for a new solution. Once our Business Analyst had completed the requirements, we went to market to compare product functionality against our needs. We also gained a general understanding of the costs involved. A business case was presented to the project team and Finance Committee and a budget was subsequently approved.
Further business analysis including product scoring was completed on the various solutions available; Cascade and one other product were short listed. After demonstrations of the two short listed products and other research, such as industry specific reference site visits, Cascade were identified as our preferred supplier. The major reason behind the introduction of a new HR system was to streamline our internal processes and reduce the administrative overheads. We were also keen to empower our employees to be responsible for keeping their own data up to date. With the problems identified with our current software and an alternative identified, our project team had authorisation to proceed with purchasing Cascade.
The Decision
One of the main reasons that we chose Cascade was that we wanted a modern, clean looking .Net solution that employees would find easy to navigate.
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