PC City manages HR growth with Cezanne Software

With 1,500 employees across 32 locations, including 30 stores, PC City is one of Spain’s leading specialist PC retailers, a position it has achieved thanks to the effort, teamwork and dedication of its employees. The company, which is part of UK headquartered Dixons Group (DSGi), was set up in Spain following the acquisition of Ei Systems in 2006. Since then, PC City has pursued an ambitious growth program with the aim of providing the widest range of IT products to the market.

To support this growth, PC City put in place plans to transform key areas of their operations. This in turn led to a demand for new solutions to manage the business. As Alejándro Expósito, IT director, remarks: "The tools we were using were inadequate to sustain such fast growth".

Cezanne: 100% human resources
One of the areas urgently in need of a better solution was Human Resources. PC City’s workforce is characterized by a large geographical spread, multiple job units, high employee turnover and a mix of hourly, part-time and weekend only workers. Alejándro Expósito explains: “To support our HR department we needed a tool that would allow us to manage the growing number of people we were taking on board. At the same time it had to be able to handle our training activities and, most importantly, it had to be a solution that was flexible, intuitive and wouldn’t be too resource-intensive".

PC City decided to go out to market to look for a new system for both HR and payroll. After evaluating different systems from both an HR and an IT point of view, PC City selected Cezanne Software. The decision was based on the company’s exclusive focus on Human Resources, the scalability, flexibility and ease of implementation of its solution and, not least, as María José Pérez Rodríguez, PC City HR technician explains: “For the impeccable work of the Cezanne consultant assigned to the project”.

The system’s training functionality was another important reason for selecting the Cezanne solution, especially given the emphasis that PC City place on this area. “We invest a lot in training, and we needed a tool that would help us manage training activities such as course scheduling and training session administration, as well as making course information available to everyone. It’s a key area of responsibility for the HR department.”

“Another deciding factor”, says Alejándro Expósito, “was the short timescale that we had”. “We couldn’t choose a solution that would take more than one or two months to implement as it was critical for us to maintain business continuity, especially during a busy sales period. As well as the economic cost associated with implementing new HR software, the people cost had to be taken into account too. “We couldn’t have 10 people exclusively dedicated to this project. It had to be a solution that could be installed with a limited number of resources.”

Fast and flexible implementation
Today, PC City is using Cezanne’s solution to manage employee data (historical personal data, historical job data, competency profiles…), organisational data (units, positions, historical organisational data…) internal training (courses, participants and training costs), employee performance (analysis of the fit between people/position, goals assignment and evaluation…), compensation (payroll, personal compensation structure, benefit policy…) and succession & career planning.

Despite this complex functionality, the solution was implemented quickly, helped by the successful relationship between Cezanne and PC City. Alejándro Expósito comments: "Cezanne has been as flexible as we needed and they were also able to understand our needs, match them to those of similar companies and implement the functionality in the core product. The final solution is standard tool, but with some customisation for PC City.

José Manuel Villaseñor, director of Cezanne Software Ibérica explains: “The people at PC City were highly motivated to start using the application as quickly as possible. This helped with completing the implementation tasks and in getting the system operational quickly. They faced a difficult challenge because they needed a complete update to their IT systems in order to achieve their planned growth.”

Feedback from the HR Department at PC City has been positive. In addition to the ease of use and flexibility of Cezanne’s solution, they are now able to work faster and more effectively. And, from a technical point of view the solution is proving simple to manage too.
“As a web application running on a SQL database that we access via a standard web browser, we are not worried about the technology. It is very stable, has never failed and maintenance has not been a problem”, explains Expósito.

A decentralised future
Today, Cezanne’s system is used by 12 people at PC City, all working in the HR department. HR activities are managed centrally, with support being provided to all of the retail outlets, including registering new joiners and leavers – resulting in more than 100 changes every week.

Cezanne has also helped PC City take advantage of the business intelligence capabilities provided by Business Objects. Information about HR related events are gathered from the retail outlets, allowing HR to run reports on employee turnover, absences etc.

Even though only HR is using the Cezanne system at the moment, PC City plans to decentralise some tasks in the future to allow unit managers to access the system and manage various issues, such as vacations and absences, updating records of professional and academic qualifications, shift changes and more.

Plans for decentralisation also means that the company is looking at providing employees with access to their own personal data, professional history, training requests, etc, through the Cezanne self-service interface. In fact, one of the reasons that PC City chose Cezanne’s system was the opportunity it provided to manage processes at a local level, so that line managers could take responsibility for their own teams and manage data easily.

Another short-term objective for PC City is to enhance the company’s security policy, so they can take more advantage of the Cezanne system, as well as provide integration with e-learning systems to improve training delivery across the company.

The Cezanne system has proved that it can provide an outstanding solution, backed as it is by a team with many years of HR experience. Uniquely, the Cezanne suite has been able to adapt to meet all of PC City’s evolving needs – functional as well as technical.