Stay ahead of, not off, the charts

Creating a timely portrait of the company in minutes—not hours—was Trustmark’s goal in searching for a way to automate its organizational charting process.

The financial services company, which provides integrated banking, investment and risk management solutions, has more than 150 offices and 2,550 associates in Mississippi and Tennessee. Trustmark had been updating its org charts manually, which was an inefficient and expensive use of time for the human resources department. As many as five associates spent up to 50 hours each month maintaining the company's charts. Trustmark wanted to use the existing data stored in its Genesys human resources system and wanted a product that accurately reflected the many indirect reporting relationships created by shared responsibilities of resources in multiple locations.

"Maintaining accurate, up-to-date information for an organization of our size is critical. Realizing that manually updating data was an ineffective use of our resources, we began searching for a tool that automated the process," says Janelle Johnson, assistant VP and HRIS manager for Trustmark.

After careful evaluation, Trustmark decided to implement OrgPublisher for Intranets from TimeVision, which uses existing human resource data from a centralized source to automatically create secure, Web-based organizational charts that are viewable on a corporate intranet using any Web browser.

Automating the organizational charting process immediately solved a major business problem and led to significant time and cost savings. All Trustmark associates now access the main org chart published in HTML format, which is viewed via a Web browser on the company's intranet. Using the list view, users can search through the chart with the drill up/drill down feature and view information such as associate name, box title and job title.

After completing the integration of the automated org chart, Trustmark worked with TimeVision on another challenge—to accurately reflect indirect reporting structures within the org charts.

"Because of the nature of our business," Johnson says, "we have many non-traditional reporting relationships. One associate may report directly to four different managers and indirectly to another. Shared responsibility across locations requires that associates appear on all org charts for a designated location even if their main office is not actually that particular location. This can become very confusing for senior management and executives. OrgPublisher's dotted-line and straight-line reporting feature solved this problem. It allows us to see an accurate map of the organization that is easy to view and understand."

In the future, Trustmark plans to use the system's what-if analysis capabilities for analysis and work force planning purposes, according to TimeVision.