As Corporate System Administrator, your role is to manage the system for your entire organisation and act as main contact with the system developers and vendor, Appraisal Smart Ltd.
This tutorial will provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to set up the system for your organisation. So let's get started!
1. System Admin Tab
UNITS
This is one of the most powerful functionalities of the Appraisal Smart System, and the place where you need to set up the entire hierarchical structure of your organisation.
Click on: "Click here to add a new top level unit", and then add all your organisation's top level units in the box provided. Such "top level" units would normally be the different divisions of the organisation, but could also be regions or branches, etc. - whatever will be most suitable in order to see the various major units of your organisation best and make them easily manageable within Appraisal Smart (the system can accommodate up to four unit levels).
We recommend that "branches" (e.g. retail outlets or factories) each be listed as a top level unit. When listing branches, always start the name with "Branch" (or Factory, Region, etc.). This will ensure that all similar unit types be grouped together in the structure (which lists names alphabetically). Example: " Branch: Dallas " Branch: New Orleans " Branch: Washington (Or "BR" for "Branch", and "REG" for "Region", to save space in the structure. Use "HO" in front of all Head Office functions to also group them together.)
On clicking EDIT, a field appears asking you to select a Divisional System Administrator (Divadmin in short). There will be no names in the dropdown list at this stage. We will come back to this later.
Completing the rest of this UNIT Admin page is self-explanatory.
LOCATIONS
Self-explanatory - follow the instructions provided on this page.
JOB TITLES
Follow the instructions provided on this page.
NB: When (what is essentially) one position/role gets executed differently in different parts of the organisation, make some distinction between them in their Job Titles, e.g. Admin Clerk Finance and Admin Clerk Stores. This is necessary so that you can create different Appraisal Templates for each later.
SYSTEM SETTINGS
The Corporate System Administrator (Corpadmin) should be a senior HR staff member, line manager or administrative staff member, normally located at Corporate Head Office.
More than one person should be nominated to fulfill this role, but there can only be one Corpadmin at any one time. The allocation of this role is done in User Admin, that we will look at shortly.
More than one person is needed to fulfill this role to cater for absences of the "primary" Corpadmin. The latter should always select a replacement from the dropdown list on this screen to replace him/her when away from the office.
It is recommended that the Logon ID and Password of this person be given in confidence to another senior staff member in case the current Corpadmin has forgotten (or is unable for some reason, e.g. illness) to select a replacement on the system.
Completing the rest of this page is self-explanatory. Follow the instructions provided.
NB. If you want to change the Appraisal Frequency and/or Cycle Start Month after having started to use the system, only do so at the beginning of your next Performance Year. So please make sure that these settings will be correct for at least the duration of your current Performance Year before you get users to start entering data onto the system.
PERFORMANCE PERIODS
Completing this page is self-explanatory. Follow the instructions provided.
Note: Once ALL the Appraisals for the current Performance Period had been completed, the Corpadmin need to sign that period off on this page, by clicking "Sign Off Now". After signoff, what was the next Performance Period will now become the new current one. After signoff, no changes can be made to employee appraisal records of that period that now went into the system archive, but the records can still be accessed, viewed and printed out at any time later.
BULK EMAILS
This is another powerful functionality of Appraisal Smart. Two types of bulk email notifications are accommodated:
(a) Automated: Write an email message at any time, select the recipients and decide how long before the Appraisals are due, should they receive it. Then forget about it as the system will execute your instructions automatically! Any number of such automated emails can be queued in the system.
(b) Quick Email: Emails created here are sent immediately when you click "Send Email"
Feel free to use this amazing functionality for any other corporate email communication, even if unrelated to Performance Appraisals.
