With more than 22,000 employees represented by over 200 unions across Canada and the U.S., Canadian National Railway Company (CN Rail) employees quickly realized the need to transition from utilizing a manual, paper-based union member grievance process to an automated, centralized one.
Each unionized employee at CN has the right to file a grievance with the company in the event of a dispute, Plamen Hristov, domain architect for CN, said. However, before the company developed and implemented their own in-house automated Grievance Tracking System (GTS) solution built using Microsoft technologies, Hristov said a manual process was being used to track the grievances. This paper-based process was not only time-consuming, but cumbersome as well since the process itself lacked visibility, he added.
“We had a difficult to follow process because there was no clear visibility and no centralized way of making sure everything worked,” he said. “The process from the time an employee submitted a claim to when it was mailed to the manager to a reach decision would often take several months, or even longer.”
In September 2006, CN Rail developers began building a customized GTS solution using Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 built on the .NET 2 platform. Rini Gahir, senior product manager of developer tools at Microsoft Canada, said by using the .NET framework as a technology platform to build applications, users will experience better connectivity, productivity, and will see a more compelling user experience. The platform also is scalable to help organizations meet their business needs, he adds.
Gahir said Softchoice, a North American large-account reseller (LAR) and also a Microsoft partner, sold the Visual Studio 2005 tool to CN.
“Partners like Softchoice are an extension of us here at Microsoft,” Gahir said. “They provide value-add because they match a customers pain points with solutions and licensing options. Especially with developer solutions and customer application solutions, there’s a lot of consultative selling and engagement that has to be done with the customer to make sure the solution is a match for the business needs.”
Development of CN’s GTS took a little over a year, where it was later introduced to management last summer. Hristov said currently, only a few unions are using GTS.
“We plan to engage and move all of the unions to GTS before the end of the year,” Hristov said.
Now with the automated system, managers and union employees can submit, file, track and manage grievances. What used to be a process that would often span months, may now only take a matter of days with the use of GTS, Hristov said. With the paper-based process before GTS, employees would often miss deadlines because it was hard to keep track of, Hristov said. What would often complicate things further, he says, is that each union had their own grievance process policies. Now with GTS, managers can see the number, type and status of the claims that are being processed each year using one centralized system. As well, when getting close to a deadline, the user will be notified, where he or she can then request an extension, to help minimize any further delays along the way. In addition, the system is available 24/7 either from the CN office, or by accessing the company’s employee extranet Web site, which provides users with more easier and efficient access.
“The benefits of having GTS as a centralized system is that it helps us ensure nothing falls through the cracks,” Hristov said. “We have more visibility since everything’s now managed through one system. It saves us a lot of time.”
