METROPOLITAN EDISON COMPANY - Pennsylvania Public Utility ...

number of hours that will be required to complete the future work and establishes futurestaffing needs. In addition to utilizing SAP AG (SAP) to record time reportinginformation, FirstEnergy uses a Work Management System called the CustomerRequest Work Scheduling System (CREWS) to capture timesheet information for fieldemployees which is transferred to SAP on a daily basis.The FE-PA Companies do not maintain historical budgeted staffing levels forprior years, hence the Audit Staff could not evaluate gaps between budget and actualstaffing levels. FirstEnergy management indicated that its approach to forecast andplan for staffing is based on known and anticipated work and not actual versusbudgeted staffing levels. It appears that the FE-PA Companies are moving in the rightdirection by using historical workload to determine future staffing needs but that theFE-PA Companies would gain more benefits if they tracked budgeted staffing levels andcompared them to the actual levels and analyzed any trends that have developed. Itwould help the FE-PA Companies determine past gaps in staffing, problems thatoccurred (including problems in timely filling certain positions), and what adjustmentscan be made to address these issues in the future. In particular the tracking andtrending of budgeted and actual staffing levels would be useful in addressing the lineworker staffing level concerns discussed in Follow-up Finding and Conclusion No. VI-5,and the engineering resource issues discussed in Follow-up Finding and ConclusionNo. VII-1.The forecasting and planning process is the foundation for strategic staffingbecause it identifies and addresses current and future challenges of acquiring andretaining talent necessary to execute the business strategy. Forecasting provides aview of known and anticipated work and helps compute the amount of resources thatwill be required to accomplish the work. Forecasting and planning for workload andresources provides visibility into the future to make informed staffing decisions andhelps management determine staffing levels on an objective analysis.Staff’s Follow-up Recommendation – Develop a process to track and trendhistorical budgeted staffing levels and compare them to actual staffing levelswhile continuing to enhance the Forecasting and Planning Process.Prior Recommendation – Develop a more consistent and effective approach to safetytraining.Prior Situation – BWG found that FirstEnergy’s safety training had some minordeficiencies. Due to inconsistency in the delivery of services from one location to thenext, all employees may not have received a handbook on the first day of employment.Although a copy of the handbook was available on FirstEnergy’s internet portal, manyskilled and craft workers did not have access to computers, and therefore, did not haveeasy access to the manual. The Human Resources (HR) Department required eachlocation to provide safety training to its employees at least once a week; however, thetraining was not always consistently administered due to varying schedules.- 70 -