Archives are essentially exactly what they say, they are a copy of project exactly as it is when it is archived for future access with read-only access and export functions enabled so that no changes can be made. Although archiving a project is not necessary as a backup there are situations where it may be beneficial and necessary to archive your project for future access, some of these scenarios can include:
1. Mass re-evaluation of Job Classes without significant changes to duties
In this scenario you will want to archive your project to ensure you have historical records of the evaluations that were performed previously. This is so you can provide the accurate comparisons for years previous to the re-evaluations but still maintain the historical gender data and gender determination.
Note that any re-evaluation of a Job Class will change the evaluation for all years, not just moving forward, hence if Jobs were originally evaluated in 2015 and you have created a Pay Equity for the years 2015 to 2019, using these evaluations, and new evaluation were done in 2020, any changes (updates) to the evaluations would change the existing 2015-2019 point totals and thus may impact comparisons.
2. Any changes to the Point Table or Evaluation Tool
Although this is not common and generally not done in Pay Equity, there may be circumstances where your existing Job Evaluation tool does not properly represent your work force or is determined to be gender biased. For whatever reason changes are made to the Job Evaluation Tool, you can archive you project before making the changes, as any changes will affect past point totals and evaluations.
As shown in Scenario 1 and 2 above, one Job Class can only have one evaluation for all the years in the project regardless of when it is originally done or updated, thus a re-evaluation done in 2020, will change the point totals for the Job Class in all years in the future and past. Archiving a project will maintain the history of any past evaluations.
Depending on your Compensation Tool Plan you may run out of of archive space and have to delete past archives to create new ones, please contact HCI to discuss plan options.