Comparison to Other Solutions

The new system has a number of advantages over other solutions. The other main solutions which were discussed earlier are email, telephone and the window approach. A major problem experienced with email was that queries are received without containing the minimum information needed to process them. The new system avoids this problem by validating the query before submission, ensuring none of the details are left uncompleted. The absence of folders within the new system ensures that queries can not accidentally be misplaced or deleted which was also a concern using email.

A lot of time was wasted by the payroll manager using the other solutions due to the lack of structure and centralisation. The payroll manager would have to manually count all queries matching their criteria wasting valuable time. The new system has a payroll manager interface which contains a number of statistics pages and has been created with the intension of future development and customisation.

Another advantage of the new system is that it allows payroll personnel to manage payroll queries and efficiently liaise with other payroll personnel through history tracking and comment functionality. This functionality should reduce the time taken to resolve queries and is not offered by any of the other solutions.

The new system provides a single, centralised solution, combating the problems experienced in other solutions. If deployed within a large organisation, the system should improve efficiency of the payroll department.

Scope of Future Development

The main areas for future development are as follows:

• The submission validation could be enhanced to not only prevent the form being submitted without all details being present, but to ensure that all details were of the correct data type. An extension to the existing java script would make this an easy modification.
• Additional statistics pages could be added to the payroll manager interface allowing them to obtain payroll query information that suits their needs. An example which was suggested during the progress meeting would be time taken to resolve queries.
• A more intelligent performance monitoring package could be added to the payroll manager interface. Performance monitoring would allow the payroll manager to take full advantage of information systems when managing payroll personnel, freeing up time for the more skilled tasks.
• Rules could be implemented to ensure the queries are resolved in order of submission. The time available and complexity of this additional requirement meant that it could not be fulfilled in the time available. This would be one of the more challenging functionality to develop in the future.