Merger Milestones: Wells Picks People Soft Personnel Program

Wells Fargo & Co. has selected PeopleSoft Inc. human resources software to run the combined personnel departments of the old Norwest Corp. and Wells Fargo.

The software will replace Tesseract, a 15-year-old package used by the old Wells.

Norwest has used a version of PeopleSoft.

The new software will give employees access to human resources information through the Internet. They could, for example, make changes to 401(k) plans on their own.

"There is a lot of potential to get rid of paper," said Patricia Callahan, Wells' executive vice president and human resources director.

Wells is scheduled begin using the new software July 1. Former Norwest users are to move by the spring of next year to an upgraded version that would include Internet capabilities.

The push toward employee self-service over the Internet is part of Wells' strategy for retail and corporate customers.

More than 600,000 retail customers bank on-line, and one analyst said that figure rises by 10,000 weekly.

One aim is to lower the cost of delivering retail services. Similarly, Ms. Callahan expects employee self-service to result in big savings within two years.

As the nation's leader in human resources and payroll software, PeopleSoft can develop the Internet services that Wells needs, Ms. Callahan said.

The vendor has 25% of the U.S. market, compared with 10% for SAP AG, the German software giant.

PeopleSoft, with its roots in personnel software, has evolved into a vendor of enterprise resource planning, challenging SAP and others. It plans to begin marketing profitability software it developed with Andersen Consulting.

Ms. Callahan said Wells is evaluating other types of software from PeopleSoft but has not made final decisions.