DeKalb County streamlines HR processes with Oracle Cloud HCM

The government of DeKalb County, Georgia, supports the needs of roughly 800,000 people across a diverse range of ethnicities, languages, and backgrounds.

The county’s workforce is nearly 7,000 employees strong spread across various departments. However, there were no self-service capabilities in Dekalb’s human resources department and processes were very paper-intensive. Every transaction, from promotions to taxes and address changes, required filling out a piece of paper, which wasn’t efficient and caused headaches for government employees and citizens. When the pandemic hit and people began working from home, these processes caused further problems because employees needed to go to physical locations across the county to pick up or drop off documents.

DeKalb was also using aging, on-premises hardware that was approaching end of life. The team maintaining those systems had to make constant patches, putting bandages here and there to temporarily fix issues. Moreover, the county was behind on tax code updates and compliance with changes in Georgia’s tax laws in 2020. Many initiatives were put on hold, while the four-person team managing the HR systems struggled under the workload.

DeKalb County knew it needed a change to streamline HR processes and make life easier on employees and the people they served.

To meet its needs, DeKalb considered several vendors such as Workday, but it was the relationship with Oracle that stood above the rest. The county had been using Oracle PeopleSoft since 1999 and Oracle E-Business Suite since 2004, so selecting Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) was the clear choice.

Modernization was the biggest draw DeKalb found in moving to Oracle Cloud. Moving from aging systems to a secure, flexible, and scalable environment in the cloud virtually eliminated the maintenance that the old environment required and gave DeKalb the foundation to innovate and tackle new initiatives.

The ease of integrating Oracle Cloud HCM with other systems in place also stood out. Connecting with other Oracle and even non-Oracle applications provided greater visibility and functionality compared to having separate systems across various teams.

After implementing Oracle Cloud HCM, DeKalb County streamlined its HR processes with its new cloud environment. Now, users can easily and securely access information anytime, anywhere. For example, DeKalb’s watershed and sanitation field workers previously had to go into the office to update their information, whereas now they access everything they need from mobile devices. This level of convenience proved to DeKalb the impact of moving to Oracle Cloud and building efficiencies while keeping everyone connected.

DeKalb also used Oracle’s automation capabilities to improve employee engagement. With past implementations, the organization faced a lot of pushback moving to new systems. With Oracle HCM, 100% of employees were impacted by the change, but the county saw much higher levels of adoption and support. The organization processed nearly 57,000 employee self-service transactions in less than a year. Previously, every personnel action required a paper form, filled in manually.

Today, employees easily access critical information and make changes with zero paper processes. This was significantly more efficient for the users and also administrators, who are responsible for driving the functionality of the application. They no longer have to worry about processing forms and instead can focus on more important tasks.

Having all HR information in one place allows DeKalb to support its most important asset—its people. From the time someone applies, is hired, and retires, all their information is stored in one system. No time or effort goes into tracking down old documents or using outside resources to gather the right information. Since implementing Oracle Cloud HCM, the organization processed nearly 1,400 new hires and completed over 38,000 new-hire onboarding tasks.

DeKalb County delivered on every new initiative that was set. Oracle Cloud HCM was put to the test during open enrollment for benefits and the first payroll cycle. The application ran smoothly, and everyone was paid on time, even with multiple salary increases that were needed as part of the budget for public safety.

Today, the organization has the confidence to tackle new challenges and explore additional services that will allow for more innovation and efficiency throughout departments.