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Case Study - City Lit

Software for People continues to deliver HR and Payroll software solutions to the college community

City Lit is a college located in Covent Garden in the heart of London and was established over 85 years ago, they have recently moved to a brand new purpose built building in Keely Street.

They provide adult learning opportunities for over 24,000 students every year, offering the biggest part time choice of courses in the capital.

City Lit also works with groups in the community to bring learning to as wide an audience as possible, including award-winning work with homeless people.

They have about 220 full time employees and approximately 700 hourly paid lecturers. They have been using Software for People systems for over four years and currently use SfP World Service for all their HR and Payroll needs.

A core use of the system is the management of their hourly paid lecturers using a built in feature called the Visiting Teacher facility. The Visiting Teacher facility enables them to manage 5,000 – 6,000 hourly paid contracts a year, right through from creating, printing and substituting contracts to calculating, authorising and if appropriate recovering the payment of those contracts.

To give you an idea of the functionality and flexibility of SfP World Service, the HR department at City Lit use the system to keep the details of all of the people who invoice them and manage a pool of about 200 hourly paid lecturers that work on an ad hoc basis using different screens. These are kept separate to their employee records.

"The reporting facility is so powerful that we are able to say it helps us strategically as an organisation."

Head of HR, Brian Watts

The HR Department at City Lit have found SfP World Service’s reporting very powerful and easy to use. Their core users often use the link to Microsoft Excel to manipulate the data further in a spreadsheet format.

One report that they have developed using SfP World Service that they find particularly helpful is one that looks at the % of teachers that have the correct qualifications by department at a certain time; this helps them when submitting information to the LSC.

City Lit also use the recruitment facility quite heavily and one major advantage they find is the ability to identify the vacancy source (e.g. an advert), which enables them to see how successful a recruitment campaign has been.

Also of great help is the way that SfP World Service is built with a workflow concept, this is useful for the mass processing of letters to applicants at each stage of the recruitment process by integrating with Microsoft Word.

City Lit also use the Training and Development facility to record all training that has occurred and keep a full training history.

Another feature in the training and development suite they find useful is the management of budgets for different initiatives. This enables them to identify how much of their budget has been spent, what it has been spent on and how much they have left at any given point in time.

"I find the Support Helpline very helpful and like the fact that they have remote access to our system for quicker response times"

Head of HR, Brian Watts

Another major advantage City Lit find in using SfP World Service is the automated production of the SIR return file that is then fed into the LSC software.

Moving forward Software for People are looking to organise an event that was originally suggested by members of the HR department at City Lit.

The event will be a gathering of all our college clients in which they are able to discuss best practices and share good ideas in terms of the system usage and portray the evolution of their individual systems.