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Synopsis
Kraft Foods Inc. is the largest food and beverage company in North America and the second largest food and beverage company in the world. It employs a workforce of about 98,000 individuals; approximately 45,000 in the United States, and 53,000 in sixty-five countries around the world, including fourteen European Union (EU) states (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom).
When the EU Directive on the Protection of Personal Data became effective in 1998, Kraft needed to revise the means by which it collected, processed, transmitted, and stored employee data. Improvements were made to the Unified Personnel and Payroll System (UPPS) to better protect North American human resources (HR) transactions. International HR systems were converted to the SAP HR system. A Data Transfer Agreement was legally established between Kraft and its operating entities in the EU member states, which specified restrictions on personal data and mandatory data protection principles. The position of Chief Information Security Officer was created, and stronger data security policies and practices were developed and implemented throughout the company.
Questions
1 a)Through the UPPS, Kraft provides its employees online access to their own employee data. Why would Kraft do this?
b)Why would Kraft want to move all of its North American HR transactions from UPPS to SAP HR?
Expert Answer
The European Union has formulated a Data Protection directive which has several governing principles with respect to the data protection of the subjects. And according to the directive the data when collected, should be informed to the concerned subject, reason mentioned, get assent, should be highly secured, should be informed, availability and accountability o the data should be provided.
And according to these governing principles, the subject should have access to their data to let them know what data has been captured and to give a chance to correct any information that is in-correct or needs updates.
And according to the above governing principle, Kraft gave access to their employees, on their data via the UPPS system and to comply with the above in-laws and data protection principles.
There might be a array of reasons why Kraft moved its data to SAP HR system. The first one can be due to the European Union data protection directive which was in place and which would be advanced to the next level of General Data Protection Regulation, which would have specific governance of personal data of employees. To ensure that the data protection is guaranteed, SAP HR system, could be used, which would already be compliant of the above and would have deep rooted analytics to ensure appropriate reports could be established to prove the same, if need arises. As well to be cost effective, UPPS could be transferred with all of its data to SAP HR which is complaint rather than enhancing UPPS system, which would have been a costly affair. As well as, maintaining a unified and enhanced, stable system would have also resulted in their decision.
