Muckles LLP

Who are Muckles LLP?

Muckle LLP is a commercial law firm based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Specialism' s include commercial, corporate finance, property, employment, dispute resolution, debt recovery, public sector and private client. We have approximately 130 people with a view to increasing that to approximately 200 over the coming 3-5 years.

Summary Pre Cascade

Julia Smith, Director of HR at Muckles comments, “All our HR/people information was in different documents and in different formats. We held a database in Word and other ad hoc spreadsheets in Excel. Carrying out analysis or doing any reporting was very manual and extremely time consuming. The data we had was often out of date and inconsistent. The management of people data was almost entirely manual and paper based.”

The Challenge

The growth of the firm and the increasing requirement for robust people information and reporting meant that the budget was made available. In addition, a new Director of HR had been appointed to make the HR agenda for the firm a more strategic one. The investment into HR software and particularly self service would automate and improve processes to free up HR time to focus on HR development and project work.

Julia comments, “We asked 6 different suppliers to tender and carried out selection against a pre agreed criteria. The criteria was split into the categories including essential functionality, desirable functionality, implementation and project management and the company.

Cascade scored 11% higher than their next nearest competitor on our tender list. They had the highest score in every category.”

The Decision

Julia comments, “Cascade's product was by far the most flexible we saw. That was the most attractive element of the proposition. The ability to build, amend and create screens and fields and query builder was precisely what we needed from a reporting point of view. We felt self service was user friendly and intuitive and the additional modules, particularly surveys and workflow are really useful. In terms of cost, Cascade we felt was huge value for money. The system that was the closest in terms of functionality was quoted at more than twice the cost of the Cascade system.”

The Project

The Cascade system was implemented in a timely manner with the integration of each module being carefully planned. The pre-installation documentation allowed the HR / Finance department to do the necessary preparation prior to the onsite training. The documentation was easy to understand and as a result of this preparation the onsite training was more effective.

Julia comments, “Implementation in the main was smooth and straight forward. The Cascade team were flexible when we had to shift project priorities and change dates.

The training was very comprehensive and any issues were resolved quickly. If anything we over budgeted for training days. The helpdesk have been excellent. They are responsive and very easy to deal with. My recommendation to anyone about to implement an HR system is to carry out a complete data cleanse before transferring data. We went into launch fairly confident that we had up to date data. Another Cascade customer advised me to think through very carefully what we wanted the system to do before implementation. That was sound advice. We made sure that all of our processes were documented before our training so workflows for example were much easier to understand and build.”

Summary

Julia comments, “The Cascade project has delivered against the objectives set at the outset.

The key benefits we have seen are:

• People data in one, accessible and secure place
• Reporting is superb. Query builder has made a huge difference to our ability to extract, manipulate and report on data
• Through self service we have been able to give our business development team access to query builder so that they can extract the various data sets we need for tenders
• We find that our Managing Partner and other senior people are now doing their own reporting instead of asking HR. It is so straight forward
• It has also helped us achieve an award for equality and diversity because we have been able to rectify an issue we had around monitoring equal opportunities
• Cascade has helped facilitate better monitoring both through reporting and the survey module which enables us to collect data
• Our ability to monitor leave and absence is way ahead of where we were twelve months ago
• Self service implementation went extremely smoothly which I think is credit to how intuitive it is as a system
• We have the ability to add screens and fields relevant to us allowing us to capture important data

Overall, implementation has been smooth and I think the best test of how valuable it has become is to think how we would manage if it were to be taken away from us. I cannot imagine running the HR function without it now which I think is a good testament. As such, I have and will continue to recommend Cascade to others.”