International Business Machines Corporation IBM recently announced a contract win from the Department of Health in England for the management and transformation of the National Health Service Electronic Staff Record system (NHS ESR).

Though the announcement came on Mar 26, the five-year agreement was signed in Dec 2014. IBM will collaborate with NHS ESR to provide the services from this year onward.

ESR is a primary workforce management tool for the National Health Service in England and Wales, catering to as many as 1.4 million employees. ESR allows employees to access information regarding payroll, learning, talent management and other HR services, thereby centralizing the whole workforce information.

The scope of the contract requires IBM to revamp the system by enabling improved mobile access and additional features for self-service to augment the system’s efficiency and accessibility. The Mobile Ready Portal will be designed by IBM Interactive Experience for PC, Android and iOS users. The novel interface will allow employees to have ease of access to all HR services on mobile, expenses, e-learning etc. The advanced technology solutions from IBM will leverage data analytics and social learning capabilities to enhance performance levels and knowledge sharing while leading to improved clinical outcomes.

Moreover, this project will pave the way for improved services in the future by allowing the central business intelligence to report in an efficient manner through dashboards, alerts and other collaboration tools. This is expected to augment performance while simultaneously bringing down costs.

IBM has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Better-ranked stocks in the technology sector include Top Image Systems Ltd. TISA, Aspen Technology, Inc. AZPN and DST Systems Inc. DST. All these stocks sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

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