SITUATION

CIMB Berhad is a fully integrated investment bank and is recognized as a market leader in the Malaysian capital markets. The only listed investment bank on the Bursa Malaysia, CIMB is a subsidiary of Commerce Asset-Holding Berhad, Malaysia’s second largest financial services provider.



It offers the full range of services in the debt markets, equity markets and corporate advisory. It also provides services in lending, private banking, private equity, Islamic capital markets as well as research capability in economics, equity and debt markets. CIMB also has strong market presence in the secondary bond and equity markets as well as derivative markets.



CIMB managed RM51.38 billion in bonds between 1991 and 2004, equivalent to a 48.2 per cent market share. Since 1991, it has raised over RM13 billion in initial public offerings on behalf of 139 client companies. In 2003, CIMB was ranked number one in bonds having raised RM9.3 billion.



CIMB Berhad Group comprises five major subsidiaries: Commerce International Merchant Bankers Berhad, CIMB Discount House Berhad, CIMB Securities Sdn Bhd, CIMB Futures Sdn Bhd and CIMB (L) Limited. The Group’s total staff strength currently stands at 822.

The company has also made its mark in the area of human resources, with CIMB winning the National Human Resource Excellence Award in 2002. A year earlier, the group decided to consolidate its internal operations by centralizing the human resources functions instead of having individual HR departments in the group’s subsidiaries.



With an expanded, centralized HR Department, there was a pressing need to tap on technological innovation to improve business processes and operational efficiencies. This prompted CIMB to deploy eHR, an electronic human resources workflow solution developed on the Microsoft platform by Microsoft Gold Certified partner, Mesiniaga Bhd.



Up till then, the processes in the HR Department were basically manually driven. Other key challenges which CIMB faced then were difficulty in tracking the status of staff requests and applications; lack of integration between various departments resulting in duplication of effort and data-entry errors; missing forms and ever increasing storage space required for hardcopy forms.



Before the introduction of eHR, the HR Department had to service about 600 users on a daily basis for various HR-related forms and requests. Because these forms and requests were handled manually and paper-based, it took a great deal of time to process. With manpower expected to increase in the coming years, the situation would only get more pressing.



As the information from the paper forms were not keyed into any electronic system, each time any staff information was required, it had to be physically retrieved from the files. For managers, this meant they had no efficient way to find out how many of their staff were on leave or who had gone for training.



“We spent a lot of time digging for information from the files, and then checking and verifying records with the users,” says Hamidah Naziadin, Director, Admin & Human Resource, Commerce International Merchant Bankers Bhd.



“Our mission at that time was also to change HR’s role from a very traditional administrative one to become more like a strategic partner. And how are we going to move ahead if we are going to be continually bogged down by all this?” Hamidah asks.



“We needed a system which could empower HR staff, making them a whole lot more efficient,” she says. Hamidah adds that empowerment comes from having “information at your fingertips” and being able to analyze the information to make better and faster decisions.