CIBC Taps PeopleSoft HR System

CIBC turns to the PeopleSoft 8 HRMS application suite to streamline its HR business processes and provide employees with improved access to key HR information and services.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) has turned to the PeopleSoft 8 Human Resources Management Systems (HRMS) application suite to streamline its HR business processes and provide employees with improved access to key HR information and services. Toronto-based CIBC selected EDS Canada as the outsourcing service for deploying and managing the PeopleSoft 8 HRMS.

The PeopleSoft solution will enable 40,000 global employees to perform online such tasks as adding a dependent to their health insurance policy, changing their payroll deductions, enrolling in benefits programs, changing their beneficiary, calculating pension benefits and doing retirement planning.

EDS Canada, which took over the staffing and actual operations of CIBC's HR services in June, is still running CIBC's old systems until it completes installation of the PeopleSoft 8 HRMS system and transfers all information over to the new system.

Some self- service applications are already implemented on the Web, such as compensation planning and pension planning tools. Others will be added in the spring, and the final operating environment will be completed in the fall.

Employees will sign onto the company intranet through the portal, My.HR@CIBC. Managers will use the portal during the hiring of an employee, to provide bonus or salary recommendations, and for compensation reviews.

"What we've done," said Hugh MacDonald, vice president of strategic alliance management in the HR division at $287.5 billion CIBC, "is enter into a business process outsource arrangement for HR, which is unusual for a company of our size."

When the entire system goes live, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce will have reached its goal of moving toward an eHR environment through an integrated PeopleSoft platform for all eHR initiatives.

"This will result in having 80 percent of our employee transactions processed online through self-service," said MacDonald.

A few years ago, CIBC was confronted with the problem of having numerous old HR management systems that needed to be integrated. In 2000, a project group spent the year examining four options that were available to the company: build it themselves; have a partner design and build it; have a partner build, design, and run it; or consider business process outsourcing.

"We took the fourth option and decided to outsource everything at once," MacDonald said. "This included 330 processes and 600 to 700 procedures."

PeopleSoft 8 HRMS was selected over a number of vendors. The product met two of CIBC's top criteria: it was a single solution, which would work across the global enterprise, and it was a system that has a certain presence in the marketplace.

"We didn't want to select a software solution that only one company in the world used because it would be difficult to find employees to run it. In addition, these employees would expect and demand a high salary," MacDonald said.