Fargo Publishing Company One Issue

Fargo Publishing Company

One issue that Fargo Publishing Company is having is in its payroll system. Currently, the Human Resources department is given each of the department's time cards to enter in manually. In doing so, the Human Resources department is making a handful of errors. This costs the Human Resources department and the production departmental supervisor time, and not catching an error could potentially cost the company money.

In order to eliminate this issue, Fargo should consider upgrading its time reporting system. Integrating an electronic time reporting system eliminates Human Resources from the situation, leaving less room for errors. If the department supervisors are able to review the time information reported by each individual employee they oversee, they will be able to better know whether or not the time reported is accurate or not. After fixing the errors, the report can be electronically submitted to the company accountant.

Fargo currently has many issues with labor costs that are resulting in decreased profits, despite their steady maintenance of market share. In Organizational Behavior studies, it was found that when a company had employees doing specialized functions, productivity went down. Employees feel isolated to specific tasks, and are not emotionally invested in the tasks. Rather, the employees were set to "auto-pilot," completing only what is expected of them. If the employees are able to do a number of different tasks within their own department, rather than one or a few, the productivity of the entire department will increase (Nelson & Quick, 2011).

In the event that the high labor costs are related to the inaccurate reporting of labor hours, changing from paper to electronic time reporting should assist in covering the issue. At the current time, the Human Resources department is in charge of taking the physical pieces of paper and punching in the data. Because the Human Resources department is disconnected from each of the departments, they will not be able to catch errors that would be obvious to department supervisors. Giving the department supervisors the authority to take responsibility over each individual employees' hours to ensure accuracy should allow for the catching of errors and purposeful overstating of time, while allowing the employees to enter their time into the computer themselves gives opportunity to report accurate data the first time.

By using simply mathematical equations, Fargo will be able to measure the benefits of implementing these recommendations. Single-factor productivity can be measured by taking the units produced and dividing it by the labor-hours used. For instance, if 1,000 units are produced for every 250 hours of labor, the number of units per labor-hour would be four. If the changes in the functions increased units or decreased hours, the company will see a positive change in their productivity, thus saving them money (Herzer & Render, 2008). The company can also determine how many hours of labor were spent on the old time reporting system vs. The new. The difference will be the cost savings that the company gains, however, if the hours incurred in the new system are greater than those in the old system, the change has been unsuccessful.