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BEACON (HRIS)
North Carolina State Government is a large, complex organization with an annual general fund budget of more than $25 billion and over 85,000 employees. Although the State's agencies have different missions and serve different constituencies, they share similar business functions, such as human resources, payroll, budget management, accounting and more. Building Enterprise Access for North Carolina's Core Operation Needs or BEACON is a statewide collaborative effort designed to transform the way the State does business by modernizing and standardizing key business processes in human resources, payroll, budget management, taxation, data storage and accounting.
In 2008 the state implemented the BEACON HR/Payroll system which is a database utilizing SAP R/3 software. DHHS “went live” in the system on April 1, 2008.
There are a variety of personnel actions that may take place during the life cycle of a state employee (e.g., new hire, transfer, salary adjustment, leave of absence, reallocation, separation). In BEACON, these actions are referred to under the category of Personnel Administration (PA). All PA data is stored in a central database shared across system modules (e.g., PA, Benefits, Payroll) and shared between state agencies as employees transfer.
This module is designed to process position actions such as: creating positions, transferring positions, reallocations, and maintaining other position settings in the BEACON system. This module is also used to define organizational structures including reporting hierarchy used to generate o-charts.
Security access to the BEACON system allows employees to display HR data, manage business processes, maintain information, run reports, and various other human resource and payroll tasks. Supervisors assign security access roles to positions based on job design and the employee’s functional need to access data in BEACON. Typically, these security roles are assigned to positions responsible for the human resources, payroll, timekeeping and funding areas of each organization. These roles then dictate:
Almost every NC state employee will participate in BEACON training to become familiar with how to access and maintain personal information in Employee Self Service (ESS). Beyond ESS, there are several other modules available in BEACON which include: Personnel Administration, Organizational Management, Time Management, Payroll and Benefits. There is required training to gain access to these modules. In BEACON, training is:
To register for BEACON training, the Human Resources Manager completes a BEACON Security Change Form which is submitted to the Central Human Resources Classification & Compensation Section. The Security Change Form indicates the security roles assigned to a position. This information is then used by the Central Office to schedule classes.
The BI module of the BEACON system allows core users to run reports for a wide variety of business needs. Reports have been created for the Personnel Administration (PA) and Organizational Management (OM) modules. Each report is numbered and provides the flexibility to customize it to fit the specific needs of the user.
