Development Roadmap Update

In March 2018, ESR Release 38 included the final pieces of the ESR Enhance Development Roadmap.  Starting with enabling internet access for employee users and improved on-line payslips in summer 2016, this significant period of development has introduced a number of key changes to improve the functional scope and usability of the ESR solution. 

Our Roadmap bulletins have outlined the changes as we have progressed along the timeline and key items have included:

• Comprehensive updates to the reporting solution:
  • Change Event and View Only Audit;
  • Payroll Exception Reporting;
  • Wide range changes to the BI solution;
• Significant updates to the employee, manager and learning administration user interfaces;
• Introduction of the “My.ESR” Portal including a comprehensive library of Portlets;
• Extending internet access for manager Self Service and Business Intelligence reporting for professional users ;
• Workflow delivery and interaction by e-mail.

The subsequent increase in overall ESR deployment demonstrates the investment has delivered against the principle objectives, including cementing the solution at the heart of NHS workforce planning and management and empowering employees and managers to be more effective and proactive with the data they have so easily available to them.   In the 6 months following the completion of Portal Provisioning (October 2017 to March 2018) user growth has been significant:

• The number of unique employees who have now accessed ESR through the Portal increased by 440,228 (164%);
• In October 2017, the total number of Portal logins was 879,949. In March 2018 this had grown to 1,908,894;
• The number of employees accessing self-service each month has risen by 11% to 510,624;
• The number of employees that no longer receive a paper payslip has increased by 128,111 (45%).

We will continue to monitor deployment of ESR across the NHS and will assist organisations looking to maximise the investment in ESR through a number of tools including our 2018/19 ESR Assessment - which you can access by contacting your NHS ESR Functional Advisor or Account Manager.

Alongside the Development Roadmap, other work streams have also continued to deliver change to organisations and users. These include:

• The upgrade to Oracle 12.2 (December 2017);
• The replacement for EDI (February/March 2018);
• Gender Pay Gap Reports (December 2017);
• 21 further improvements to the Portal and Portlets;
• 32 changes through our “Change Pipeline” - many of those coming through the NSIG networks;
• 171 BI reports created/amended.

ESR however does not stand still, and our plans for 2018/19 are as aggressive as previous years with some key changes in the next six to nine months:

• Migration away from N3 to HSCN (planned for July 2018);
• Implementation of the 2018 Pay Award (July 2018 - dates to be confirmed following completion of testing);
• Ending the “mhapp” access route to ESR – all access to be through the ESR Portal (planned for September 2018);
• Migration away from Discoverer – (Discoverer will be removed from ESR in December 2018);
• Improvements to IAT initiation and portability of national competencies (dates to be confirmed);
• Working with national stakeholders to ensure that ESR continues to meet the strategic challenges of productivity and efficiency and the Streamlining agenda.

The infographic below provides a helpful summary of our development plans in the coming months and further information on specific developments can be found in our Development Schedule on kBase.

It is worth noting that this scale of development to ESR, in combination with defect resolution and a very high demand for organisational merges and de-merges, means that that the solution does have to be withdrawn at specific times through the year. At a time when ESR has such a large and diverse user base – reflecting the 24/7 nature of the NHS – this inevitably can lead to concern and confusion around ESR availability. You can help us with this by:

• Communicating the planned and actual ‘downtime’ schedule with your users so that they are aware as soon as possible when their ESR will not be available to them. We will also publish announcements on the Portal and via the service status on the ESR App as appropriate;
• With a reliance growing towards on-line payslips, ensure that you set the Payslip View date to be as early as possible to minimise the impact that any month end ‘downtime’ may have on your users wishing to view their payslips on-line.