Teesside University has gone live with iTrent, the fully integrated talent management, workforce planning, HR and payroll solution from MidlandHR. The award-winning university, which has 28,000 students, opted for a five year contract for MidlandHR’s full suite of iTrent modules, including core HR, Payroll, Self-Service, Web Recruitment and E-payslips, to support staff.

The partnership is already fulfilling several key objectives for the university, which has seen improved efficiency, streamlined workflows, and massive reductions in paper consumption. “Teesside University was the first modern university to be named University of the Year,” explains Steffi Dearlove, HR Systems and Information Manager at the university. “We continually strive to maximise our potential and inspire others to do the same. This is through our commitment to delivering excellence – not only in our teaching and student support – but also in our enterprise, business engagement and research. Therefore, it made sense for us to seek out an HR and payroll solution that would have a real impact on our business processes.

“Our old system was costly and difficult to develop and we were not sufficiently using it to support the underlying function of HR and payroll. The purpose of the project was to design, build and implement standardised, streamlined, best practice structures, processes and systems to support the business strategy. We wanted to be able to provide complete life cycle processing for all aspects of recruitment, HR processing and payroll administration. The chosen solution also needed to integrate with our finance system and provide quality management information. Having reviewed what was available on the market, the highly functional but user friendly iTrent solution was the product most closely aligned with our complex objectives.

“We are now enjoying a range of new capabilities and benefits. Workflow has helped remove manual processing and the photocopying of papers and forms. This has alleviated the administrative burden, in addition to reducing Teesside’s carbon footprint. We estimate a saving of £4,000 per annum from reduced printing costs alone. We are also using alerts or triggers to monitor and improve data quality and we are able to complete processes for our people far more rapidly and efficiently. MidlandHR has been a key partner in the development and fulfilment of all our objectives.”

“We are thrilled that Teesside University is already realising so many benefits from using iTrent,” comments Declan McGrath, managing director at MidlandHR. “The partnership between MidlandHR and the university is very positive, and we are looking forward to helping Teesside continue to meet its organisational and HR objectives with the next phase of implementation, which will see web recruitment come into place.”