Big Macs, Quarter Pounders, and Egg McMuffins. Golden arches. “We love to see you smile”. These things are all part of the 47 year-old company that has been enjoying, for many years, grand success as the world’s leading food service retailer.

Since 1955 when revenues for the first day of business totaled $366.12, to 47 years later when revenues total over $7 billion (as of 6/30/02), McDonald’s has flourished as the leading fast food provider with over 30,000 restaurants in 121 countries serving 46 million customers each day. Impressive, but not the only accomplishments of this well-established brand. McDonald’s has been named a Fortune Magazine Global Most Admired Company in the Food Services category as well as one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Moms.

HRToolbox has enjoyed a friendly business relationship for over one year now with this well-known company. McDonald’s was first introduced to HRToolbox at the ORC Midwest Roundtable in 2000 when Sharon Weglowski, an Expatriate Manager at McDonald’s, happened to speak with two HRToolbox clients. At that time, McDonald’s was considering a transition to a web-enabled solution that would allow access while traveling outside of the office and also to other McDonald’s markets around the world. Tricia Berg, the HRToolbox Project Manager at the time, was most interested in HRToolbox because it is “a very good product at a reasonable price”. Sharon Weglowski explained that McDonald’s and HRToolbox have a particular goal in common, and that this goal was one of the reasons HRToolbox was selected to manage their international assignee population. “One of McDonald’s founding principles is to deliver quality, service, and value to its customers. And HRToolbox is committed to the same”.

The HRToolbox Implementation was a tremendous success, due to the enthusiasm of the McDonald’s team, their desire to “think outside of the box”, and their drive to incorporate new ideas and solutions. The Implementation was a learning process for the McDonald’s team, as they discovered that some of their policies needed revision in order to make them more global in nature and alleviate many of the exceptions in the compensation packages.

As the transition was made from their outdated system to HRToolbox, Sharon explained that “HRToolbox has helped us to notice the need to spend more time on the process and workflow aspects of managing the population and standardizing procedures [and] formats”. Tricia explains that the time savings encountered by using HRToolbox, include “being able to access information outside of the office, having a central location for all of the expatriate information (rather than looking through hard copy files), as well as providing access to controllers in other countries so that they may enter the locally paid compensation items directly into the system [HRToolbox]”.

Today, there are 33 McDonald’s administrators accessing the HRToolbox database. These administrators reside in 22 countries. The McDonald’s team hopes to expand their usage of HRToolbox and eventually roll out Employee Self-Service access to their international assignees. The team plans to allow the assignees access in order to update their personal information and to view their compensation worksheets.

As the McDonald’s – HRToolbox relationship continues to grow and change, so do the challenges faced every day by the International Assignment team at McDonald’s. HRToolbox plans to help McDonald’s streamline their processes and procedures in any way possible to make their busy schedules more manageable.

On October 1, 2002, HRToolbox held a successful Compensation and Reporting Workshop in Atlanta, GA for some of our clients. The Client Services and Development Teams discussed the existing reporting and compensation features of HRToolbox, as well as the upcoming enhancements scheduled for the system. Our clients provided a number of very valuable enhancement requests, which we are working to fit into our busy release schedule for the upcoming year. Another Client Workshop will be scheduled at some time in the next year.

On October 2, 2002, HRToolbox hosted the “Doing More with Less” Executive Briefing. It was a tremendous success! Seven attendees from various locations around Atlanta participated in our morning seminar.

Our two guest speakers, Ron Barton, an International HR Consultant and Daryl Buffenstein with Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, touched on various aspects of meeting the global HR need of a company with less time and fewer resources.

• The benefits of having a single source of recording, tracking, and reporting on expatriate/international employee information.
• Why immigration “how-to” is so important sine 9/11 and how the rules have dramatically changed.
• How you can review your current global policies regarding compensation and allowances to save money and facilitate mobility.

For a copy of Ron Barton’s presentation on International Mobility, contact Shonda Wilbourn at srwilbourn@hrtoolbox.com or (770) 481-2192.

Planned Updates

• Automatic reminders – you will soon have the ability to automatically generate reminders from various locations including from the checklist items and the payment screen
• Receive emails when your reminders are due based on the criteria you select
• Ability to notify, via email, vendors of service initiation authorizations
• Ability to distribute revised balance sheets to your assignees via email

• Ability to search for an employee using a criteria set that you created in the reporting section of HRToolbox
• Ability to add multiple Bonus Plans and multiple Stock records for each employee
• Ability to report on Compensation Package Notes using the Compensation Package Summary report type

Did You Know?

• The next HRToolbox Quarterly Release is scheduled for the third week in December
• You can process payroll in HRToolbox to generate payment records for worksheet items
• You are know able to perform gross up calculations on individual payments or on all specified payments in conjunction with your company’s payroll processing in HRToolbox. You must subscribe to the gross up tool for this functionality, so please contact HRToolbox for more information.
• HRToolbox currently has administrators located in 36 countries and 70 locations worldwide
• If you enter the incorrect password five times in a row you would be locked out of HRToolbox. This is a security feature to prevent unauthorized users from using your login id. If you are locked out, contact Mary Weaver or Shonda Wilbourn to have your password reset.
• HRToolbox offers an Employee Self-Service module, a Taxation module, a Relocation module, a Gross Up tool as well as a Global Human Resource Database. Call Linda Pinion at (770) 481-2106 for more details.

• If you run a report and the selected combination of group or filter/template/criteria is not in your “My Favorites” list, it will be added to the recent list. Unlike the reports in your “My Favorites” list, any reports that are in your “Company Favorites” list and are produced, they will appear in your recent list.
• If you accidentally delete a report from your “Company Favorites” list, that report will still appear in your “My Favorites” list.
• If you add a “My Favorites” report to the “Company Favorites” list, that report will be copied to your “Company Favorites” list, so you will have a copy of the report in both sections. This is a safeguard against losing a “Company Favorites” report as explained in the Did You Know item above.
• Any reports in your Recent List and/or your “My Favorites” and “Company Favorites” lists will be deleted if you click on the trash can icon OR if the employee group/filter, report template, and/or criteria set used for that report is deleted.
• You can report on those employees whose assignments will be completed in 60 days, 90 days, or any number of days you choose? You can create a report and set criteria on any of the date fields in HRToolbox, using the “# of days from today” feature. This will allow you to enter 60, 90 (or whichever number you choose) to create your “moving-date” report.