A new era for Your ESR

The NHS ESR Programme team have been working with our partner IBM to develop a programme of developments for ESR that would greatly improve the solution across a range of areas. In the autumn we announced the new 2016/2017 ESR Development Roadmap, setting out the vision for your ESR which includes:

• improved user interface for Self Service and learning management (including a portal);
• business process improvements to support Self Service and learning management;
• enhanced reporting for payroll;
• A comprehensive reporting strategy to support the withdrawal of Discoverer;
• Delivering as many ‘Essential’ requirements from the original user consultation as possible to maximise benefit and to support the objectives of the ESR business case;
• An upgrade to Oracle 12.2 that has been scheduled for December 2017.

The plan

Whilst the large scale developments are planned from Release 33 in December 2016 onwards, there has been on going work to deploy some developments into ESR during the summer.  In June this year we made changes to the online payslip.  With a new design aligned to that of the paper payslip and a printable pdf format that allows employees using Employee Self Service to print personal copies, this change has provided NHS organisations with the option to switch off paper payslips, thereby introducing operational efficiencies.

In October we launched ESR via the internet – myess.esr.nhs.uk.  This significant development has opened up the potential for 1.4 million NHS employees to access their ESR record anywhere in the UK, removing the need for N3 connectivity and offering a wide range of efficiency and staff engagement benefits to organisations.

Making ESR more easily accessible was one of the key user requirements identified as part of the user consultation during the re-procurement project, and since the launch of myess.esr.nhs.uk we have seen an increasing number of NHS organisations look to implement more Self Service functionality.

Releases 33 and 34 will see ESR transform in terms of your user experience.

User Engagement

To launch the roadmap the NHS ESR team ran a series of webinars through late October and early November.  These sessions outlined the developments planned to enhance ESR in a number of key areas: 

• An improved User Interface and supporting changes to business processes for self-service and learning management users;
• The introduction of a Reporting Strategy for ESR  - to support the move away from the Discoverer reporting tool;
• Improved functionality for payroll professionals.

The webinar series was highly successful with over 1,200 individual connections across the whole series of sixteen. We are delighted that the feedback on these sessions, and more importantly the functional improvements presented has been extremely positive:

Helping you prepare for the change

To help you and your employees be ready for the changes to ESR we have added a selection of short presentations taken from the webinars to our Kbase solution covering following subjects:

• Release 33/34 Roadmap Summary;
• Release 33/34 Reporting Roadmap Summary;
• Introduction to the Employee Portal;
• Learner Homepage and Certification Improvements;
• SSHR User Interface Improvements;
• Learning Management “Quick Wins”;
• Workflow by e-mail;
• Webinar Q&As.

Your NHS ESR Functional Advisor and Account Manager also has access to the full range of presentation slide packs if you would like to discuss any of the webinar content further.

We are developing educational materials to support you with the deployment.  The first phase of this approach is to provide e-Learning materials and these materials are now available to you on ESR infopoint. 

Materials include:

• Employee and Manager Self Service User Interface changes;
• Learning Management - key changes and ‘look and feel’;
• ESR Workflow notifications by e-mail.

Further e-Learning material for Learning Management will be available in early January 2017.

In addition, updates to User Manuals and Classroom Student Guides for the areas impacted by Release 33 will be available for the beginning of January 2017.

For More information

If you have any questions about the new portal or improved functionality planned for ESR please contact your NHS Functional Advisor, details are below: