Existing Solutions

There are three main existing solutions used for processing payroll queries within a large organisation. These are email, telephone and the window approach.

Email
The majority of queries are processed using email. This solution works and to a certain extent meets some of the requirements that need to be addressed in the problem domain. A manager sends an email containing the query to a central address that can be accessed by all payroll personnel. The payroll personnel then check the central folder for emails and reply using their own email account before putting the query in a sub-folder of the central folder known as 'resolved'. A major problem experienced with this system is that queries are received without containing the minimum required information needed to process it which means that the payroll personnel would then have to reply asking for that information. Also queries are often accidentally misplaced into different folders or deleted both before and after being resolved by payroll personnel. There is no structured way of storing the queries making it diffcult to retrieve a particular query without reading each one. A lot of valuable time is wasted by the payroll manager who has to manually count queries for each of their statistics on the reports. Although the system orders the emails by arrival time it does not make sure that this order is taken when resolving them. The email system does not provide a way of tracking history of a query and seeing who is dealing with it.

Telephone
Although the majority of queries are processed using email, there are still some that are dealt with over the telephone. This approach is often taken by the Manager when they feel the query is urgent as it can sometimes take a few hours for the payroll personnel to resolve queries that are received via email. A manager telephones the payroll department and speaks to one of the payroll personnel who would resolve the query instantly and manually record the details of the query on a paper form for statistical purposes.

Although this approach ensures the payroll department has the necessary details to process the query they have to waste valuable time manually recording this information on a paper form. Again this means that the payroll manager would have to manually read the forms to gather the necessary information for their reports. Telephone calls often distract payroll personnel who might have already been trying to resolve queries received via email having an impact on the time taken for queries to be resolved. Telephone queries mean that they have two separate storage solutions for queries making it diffcult to and queries that have been resolved in the past.

Window approach
The window approach is the more traditional one, where the manager would come to the window in the payroll office. This approach is often taken by the Manager when they feel the query is either urgent as it can sometimes take a few hours for the payroll personnel to resolve queries which are received via email or too complex to be dealt with over the telephone or email. A manager would come to the payroll department and speak to one of the payroll personnel face to face, who would resolve the query instantly and manually record the details of the query on a paper form for statistical purposes. The window approach suffers from the same problems as the telephone. Valuable time is wasted by the payroll personnel manually recording the query information on a paper form and the payroll manager manually reading the forms to gather the necessary information for their reports. Window queries also distract payroll personnel who may be engaged in other activities reducing the efficiency of the department. The Window approach can only be used by Managers who are based at the same site as the centralised payroll department putting managers at other sites at a disadvantage. A single solution is to be found to combat the problems experienced in the existing solutions and to make sure that there is only one system for processing payroll queries. The solution should improve efficiency within the payroll department and ensure all management have the same opportunities to submit and retrieve replies to queries.