DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTERISED PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

The public and private organizations generate staff records. Staff records play an imperative role in providing the information needed by organizations to manage and pay their staff members, plan their workforce requirements and monitor staff performance. Ultimately, any organization’s development and sustainability will depend on sound and effective human resource management, and the approaches it chooses to follow will be derived in part from an analysis of the information contained in staff records. The goal of staff records management is to ensure that a complete and comprehensive employment history of each employee is readily available for as long as it is needed, and that the information contained in staff records supports the management, deployment, payment and development of staff. Other key objectives of staff records management are to support transparency and organizational accountability and to enable accurate audits by creating and protecting human resource records as reliable evidence (Griffin and Hoyle, 2009).

According to Cain et al (2007) organizations need to keep staff information for long periods. For example, retention periods of 70 years or longer for staff files are common in many countries. Thus, staff databases need to store data about individuals for decades – far longer periods that is typical for most database applications. The development of personnel management dates back to the period of World War I around the year 1915 and more recently to the human relations movement of 1935 – 1950.

In one of the studies of Elton mayor, he discovered that psychological factors as well as social factors influence individuals at work rather than physical factors. Specific reasons for the development of personnel management include: -

       i.            As a result of increasing influence of trade unions, traditionally personnel administration took on the role of pacifying the trade unions, so that management could be free run the companies without interference from employees.

     ii.            The formulation of minimum wages low costs and individual legislations increased the need for a team of personnel specialties.

  iii.            As the union became more sophisticated and powerful the need for highly skilled individual relations should increase.

   iv.            The increasing size of business, government and other institutions brought new dimension into the profession of personnel management.

Traditionally, it was practiced in homes where the father is the head of the family. It was he who planned what the family should do, the type of farming, size and where to sell the harvested products. His wives and children helped in the process, no external recruitment was involved, so the more wives and children a man had, the more likely it was that the family be well-of. The recent practices of personnel management in Nigeria is tied up with history and development of the public services, private companies and civil services.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

With large number of works opportunities, the human workforce is increasing, thus, there is a need of a system which can handle the data of such a large number of personnel. Manual handling of personnel information poses a number of challenges. This is evident in procedures such as leave management where an employee is required to fill in a form which may take several weeks or months to be approved. The use of paper work in handling some of these processes could lead to human error, papers may end up in the wrong hands and not forgetting the fact that this is time consuming. A number of current systems lack employee self-service meaning employees are not able to access and manage their personal information directly without having to go through their HR departments or their managers.

Another challenge is that multi-national companies will have all the personnel information stored at the headquarters of the company making it difficult to access the personnel information from remote places when needed at short notice. The project is aimed at setting up an personnel information system about the status of the employee, the educational background and the work experience in order to help monitor the performance and achievements of the employee through a password protected system.

1.3 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of this project is to design and implement a personnel management system for Nigeria Petroleum Corporation Lagos. To achieve the stated objective, the following specific objectives were laid out:

·        Design of a web-based personnel management system to fulfill requirements such as project management; leave management, report generation to assist in performance appraisal and employee trainings.

·        Develop a well secure database management system for the storage of personnel data

·        The system should yield timely and quality information to managers for decision making

1.4 Significance of the Study

This work could be useful for personnel managers or officers in an organization as well as those involved in research work on personnel management. This research work would let us know that the success of an organization largely depends on the assessment and appraisal of individuals and company employee’s potential, performance and how well the organization can strive to e

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