UK Greetings chooses Macro 4 to support HR's switch to hybrid working

GDPR-compliant information management system will provide HR team with easy online access to hundreds of thousands of employee documents from home or office

Crawley, UK, March 1, 2022 – Major greetings cards publisher UK Greetings has selected Macro 4, a division of UNICOM® Global to deploy a new GDPR-compliant online content store for its Human Resources department following a switch to hybrid working since the pandemic. The new system will deliver secure remote access to employee documents, helping HR to provide a responsive service to the company's 2500-strong workforce from any location.

By replacing its existing manual paper-based filing system, the card publisher, whose cards are available in major UK supermarkets and independent retailers, plans to realize HR efficiencies and time savings while enhancing GDPR compliance and reducing its paper and printing costs. Reducing the use of paper will also support the company's sustainability goals.

UK Greetings, one of the largest direct to retail publishers of greeting cards and social expression products in the UK, has a loyal workforce including many long-serving employees. As a result, the company has thousands of personnel documents which it needs to keep securely stored and accessible, covering a wide variety of information relating to the employment relationship.

The decision to move away from paper was made when the HR team started working from home during the pandemic, explained Laura Roderick, HR Manager at UK Greetings:

"With all our documents kept in filing cabinets in the office, we were unable to access the employee records we needed to work effectively. Even before this, however, we were planning to go digital eventually as we knew all the printing and filing we were doing was not the best use of our time. COVID-19 just gave us an additional incentive."

Macro 4 will use its Columbus enterprise information management software to create an online content store for UK Greetings' employee information. Existing paper documents will be scanned into the system, while new documents will be captured digitally. All information will be held together in individual employee files.

The solution will use encryption and role-based access to protect employee information and ensure only authorized staff can access it. Information lifecycle rules will be applied to make sure information is deleted when required under the GDPR.

As a trusted supplier which had already implemented an information management solution for the UK Greetings finance department, Macro 4 was recommended to the HR department by the company's IS team.

"In HR we need the right information at our fingertips to support our customers – the UK Greetings employees – as well as helping us to work efficiently and effectively whether we're at home or in the office. We're confident that this is what the Macro 4 system will deliver," said Laura Roderick.

About Columbus www.macro4.com/columbus The Columbus enterprise information management (EIM) suite helps organizations to share business content across multiple channels and applications, create compelling, personalized communications, and meet their regulatory obligations for managing documents and unstructured data. Columbus connects people and processes with the information they need and provides business intelligence for more informed decision making.

About UK Greetings For more than 100 years UK Greetings have been proud to create products that help people connect. As part of the American Greetings family, we've grown to become one of the markets leading, direct-to-retail greeting card and gift dressing manufacturers in the UK. UK Greetings award winning portfolio of brands stems all genres and has been raising a smile for decades. At UK Greetings 'We care' about people and the world we live in. Our primary purpose is to share happiness, laughter, and love by creating products that celebrate life's most important moments in all our lives, making the world, that means the world to us, a more thoughtful, sustainable and caring place.