thyssenkrupp Materials Business Services GmbH (tkMBS) celebrates its birthday

tkMBS has a customer base of 35 internal and external tk companies in Germany with an annual volume of approximately 216,000 payroll statements. Ensuring that employees receive their salaries in their accounts on time every month means that many parts must work together seamlessly. Carrying out a payroll with all upstream and downstream processes is a very complex task that requires the smooth cooperation of several teams.

From communicating with authorities and taking tax, social security, and legal requirements into account to linking time management aspects such as shifts worked. All this and much more goes into payroll accounting. It is an exciting and diverse field. There are company-specific factors such as collective agreements or works agreements, as well as short-term and time-critical adjustments, which require a high degree of adaptability and flexibility from our employees.

However, the portfolio of tkMBS comprises much more than just payroll accounting. tkMBS has an experienced IT department that manages various systems.

• SAP P89 (future S4 HANA): Accounting system, time management system

• Fiori: Employee self-service/management self-service

• org.manager: Digital organizational charts

• OTRS: Ticket system

• Haufe Zeugnismanager: Creation of employment references

• Flowshare: Recording of processes/workflows

• Microsoft Power Platform: Development environment for automation/dashboards/apps

• Electronic personnel file: Storage/assignment route for digital personnel documents

• Document creation tool: Creation of various documents, such as removal of time limits, extension of employment contracts and confirmations of termination

• Travel expense accounting: Processing of travel expense reports

• And more

Furthermore, project management plays a significant role at tkMBS. As a result, we have been able to implement numerous small and large-scale projects in recent years. Customer projects such as migrations, company mergers, carve-outs, the establishment of circumstances resulting from collective agreements and works agreements, corporate group projects such as Panda, upgrading our payroll system to the latest version, upgrading the OTRS ticket system, introducing Fiori, or ongoing projects: implementation of a new travel expense accounting tool and conversion of our HR system “P89” to S4 HANA.

We would like to take a closer look at one of our projects: Microsoft Power Platform. With MS Power Platform, we develop automations, dashboards, and apps that support us in our daily work in the HR field. Microsoft Power BI enables the development of customized dashboards – these development environments are used to display key figures such as the number of employees, vacation provisions, employees in their probationary period, various key figures on absences, and much more. We are currently in the process of providing all our clients with an HR dashboard with over 35 different key figures and dynamic display, with the aim of making relevant HR data evaluable at the touch of a button.

One of our Power Apps is the “Desk Booking” app. It was developed by tkMBS so that our employees can conveniently book their workspaces at ruhr tech kampus essen in Microsoft Teams – the highlight is that the booking automatically appears in Outlook and you can see in your calendar which seat you have booked. This app was presented to our customers and the first interested parties had us implement it for them. If you would like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to contact us.

Our Innovation Lab, or “Inno-Lab” for short, has been in existence for almost five years now. Here, we proactively search for, find, evaluate, and ultimately introduce new software. At regular intervals, we also discuss potential pain points with our customers and develop solutions to address them. For example, we initiate automation to replace time-consuming manual processes with modern solutions or tools (e.g. introduction of the Haufe Zeugnismanager).

All these tasks and topics deal with sensitive content, particularly our customers' personnel and payroll data. That is why data protection and data security are a high priority at tkMBS. We are aware of our responsibility in this area and have further developed our deletion concept in collaboration with TÜV Rheinland. In addition, we check our tools for data protection/data security. This includes reviewing and finalizing all relevant data protection/contractual documents. All our tools and processes are recorded in a tool and classified in accordance with data protection law. A review is carried out on an annual basis.

In our expanded portfolio catalog, we support our customers with training courses to help them acquire new knowledge or refresh existing knowledge. Examples: OM basic training, tips and tricks on e-files, training for time administrators, SAP HCM basic knowledge, etc