PT. Semen Padang redefines its HR management structures

January 2007, Jakarta – DataOn announces that PT. Semen Padang has chosen the SunFish HR Enterprise Version to automate its manual HR administration. Having to manage nearly 2200 employees time and attendance records, payroll and tax calculation manually is quite time intensive and error-prone. Moreover, the company wanted to start going beyond pure staff administration and include the more strategic issues of performance monitoring and training in their new definition of HR management.

PT. Semen Padang is the oldest cement plant in Indonesia with a long and eventful history. Established in 1910 with the name NV Nederlandsche Indische Portland Cement Maastschappij (NIPCM), it started its first production with a capacity of approx. 23,000 tons per year in 1913 and reached a capacity of 170,000 per year in 1939.

The company came under Japanese management control of Asano Cement Japan during the occupation from 1942-45. When the Republic of Indonesia proclaimed its independence on August 17, 1945 the employees took back the company, renamed it and handed it to the government. However, only 2 years later in 1947, the Dutch regained control of the plant during the attempt of re-occupation of Indonesia and gave it the old name.

The Dutch control finally ended in July 1958 with a Presidential Degree generally issuing the nationalization of Dutch-owned industrial and mining companies, among them NIPCM, which fell under the management of government institution central BAPPIT after the nationalization.

A government regulation in 1961 changed the status of the company to state-owned now with the name PN Semen Padang. Both status and name again changed 11 years later in 1972 to the Limited State owned PT. Persero Semen Padang.

In 1995 the final change occurred when the government consolidated the three state-owned companies to PT. Semen Gresik Group of which PT. Semen Padang is now a subsidiary. Today PT. Semen Padang has 5 plants and a total production capacity of 5,240,000 tons per year. It supplies domestically provinces incl. Sumatra, DKI Jakarta, West Java, West and South Kalimantan with their different cement types and exports its products to countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam, Maldives, Philipines, Singapore, Brunei, etc.

With the addition of more plants and a growing number of employees, the company’s manual HR management has reached its limits. The main focus of HR is gathering the information from different systems for all business units in order to properly calculate, process and report employee salaries and taxes. With the company intending to add performance evaluation and training management to their HR areas, it became clear that this situation had to change before other more strategic tasks could be tackled.

The company came to the conclusion that it needed a complete solution, which integrates and consolidates all administrative and strategic HR tasks in one single application in order to fully automate, standardize, simplify and thus accelerate their HR processes. With shortening critical HR procedures and decreasing the average time of administrative duties, the HR department can more broadly focus on strategic employee development and their alignment with PT. Semen Padang’s HR objectives. 

After reviewing a variety of vendors PT. Semen Padang decided for SunFish HR Enterprise for the following reasons:
- The software best matched their expectations regarding a fully integrated and comprehensive
   but yet user-friendly solution;
- Flexible solution to accommodate future modifications;
- Reasonable IT investment in respect of future upgrades;
- Competitive Price to match their budget requirements;
- Integration with 3rd party applications incl. accounting system, attendance machine; and
- HRIS and Implementation experience.

Once implemented SunFish HR will provide a single, standard platform that covers payroll management, employee information, approval processing, organizational structure management, employee performance tracking, personnel career and development as well as training management.

SunFish HR will automate many administrative HR processes simplifying management, tracking and reporting tasks for the 2200 employees in the multiple business units and branches of the company. The time-consuming administration of payroll and tax reporting becomes an easy task as all necessary information is available in the same system via a mouse click and always automatically follows proper workflows for approval and consolidation. Thus the first step is taken for HR staff to use their freed up time to approach the tasks of personnel planning and strategy development and to align the entire workforces overall strategic business objectives and growth plans.