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After awarding a large HR outsourcing contract to EDS Canada a year ago, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is moving ahead with a PeopleSoft implementation that will provide the bank's employees with self-service human resources services.

CIBC struck the $227 million deal to outsource its core HR operations and related technology services to EDS last March.

EDS has licensed PeopleSoft 8 Human Resources Management Systems (HRMS) and is deploying and managing it for CIBC. HRMS will enable the bank's 45,000 employees to perform personal tasks online, including the addition of dependents to their health insurance policy, changing their payroll deductions and enrolling in benefits programs, all through a standard Web browser.

Pete Smith, regional vice-president of PeopleSoft Global Services, said the CIBC implementation is at the upper end of the scale in terms of size. CIBC already had some PeopleSoft HR within its organization, thanks to an acquisition. "The remainder would be using a system that had been developed many years ago internally at the bank," he said, "so this is a little bit of an integration project and it's certainly a change in the fundamentals of how the bank is managing their HR with the business process outsourcing to EDS."

The first few months of the EDS contract was devoted to getting a handle on what was what -- it wasn't strictly a PeopleSoft project, said Smith. The implementation of HRMS, however, is on track to be completed in September 2002.

Under the outsourcing contract, CIBC moved about 200 jobs to EDS, said Hugh MacDonald, vice-president of strategic alliance management for CIBC's HR division. "It freed up our IT department from having to support what was essentially an internal customer. The resources that remain are able to support revenue producing businesses."

One of the challenges of having its own internally developed HR systems was finding skilled staff to run it, said MacDonald. "It was made more challenging when we started building our investment banking capabilities in the mid-90s." In the year 2000 CIBC launched a project dubbed "Harmony" to look at what the bank's options were. "The project team recommended, among other things, that we introduce one system.

"Part of the arrangement was that EDS was committed to implementing PeopleSoft 8 and migrate all of our legacy HR systems to it." EDS took over managing those legacy systems, as well as 330 processes, in June 2001. By the end of October, EDS had migrated about 30 systems and the staff over to its own premises in both Toronto and New York.

"At the end of 2002, the idea would be that our 30 systems or so and all of the processes would actually be operating on an infrastructure that itself was based on PeopleSoft 8. What we would end up with is a fully e-HR environment, where 80 plus per cent of our transactions would be done through self-service."

According to a recent Towers Perrin e-Track poll of 200 North American companies, 91 per cent use the Web to communicate with employees and 48 per cent allow employees to manage some services like training and benefits via the Web. To date, EDS has brought in several self-service Web sites that enable employees to manage pension contributions and managers to do compensation planning.