A small 5 person organization may not need a HR/ Payroll system at all. A large manufacturing firm with 90% as blue collared workers may need a HR/ payroll system that is more operationally compliant. A professional consulting with hundreds of highly paid professionals may need a highly mature system with powerful online and self service systems. Of course there will be many shades in between.
Some of the primary triggers that drive maturity are
Number of employees – an obvious one
Importance of compliance – mandatory nature of compliance rules and documents related to pay, benefits, leave, training, internal movements etc.
Value of people – Are you a people centric organization and how much does your business model depend on people
Employee Churn – Are people leaving or moving continuously. HR has major responsibilities in such environments
If you are high on all these areas – get the best HR system – powerful features, best practices, high levels of productivity providing self service capability
If you are low on these get local HR system administered in the back office
If you are somewhere in between run an administration setup and provide self service/ kiosk / capability in high return areas like leave and attendance
KServeHCM products (www.KServe.net) are structured currently as three products based on this philosophy – Standard, Pro and Advanced. All three are web ready and hence ready for the future be it SaaS or even Cloud computing ready.
A last piece of advice – don’t buy a system that does not allow you to graduate to the next level easily when your organization needs it.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Without an underlying platform, a HR product will crumble
Take any good product and you will notice something - consistency across the board. The interface will be the same across
* User screens,
* Reports
* Alerts
* Help pickers
* Menu structures
* Login and navigation
* Text fonts
Look deeper under the hood and you will see consistency in smaller things like
* How to recognize mandatory fields and document identifiers
* What type of fields default and under what conditions
* How does one delete, modify or view a record
* What referential integrity checks should be done during deletion
* How can one export data or send trigger mails
* How are additional business rules or logic added
Many products are built without an underlying platform. However once customer and industry specific variations occur, it is almost impossible to keep adding to the product without affecting the underlying consistency and architecture. It is like building a house without a foundation. The wise man built his house on a rock - or in today's terms a good foundation. Take any product that has succeeded over a long period of time SAP, Oracle, Peoplesoft - all of them have a good foundation.
The KServe products (www.KServe.net) are all built on the same underlying platform. Take a look at CRM, HCM or our ERP products - they will have consistency and a uniform architecture. This is because we built a strong foundation. The foundation is proven across many customers, and so all our products are proven. You only have to verify if the process covered is relevant to your business and be sure that the application will stand the rigor of rugged usage by enterprise users.
Platform, software product, foundation, KServe
* User screens,
* Reports
* Alerts
* Help pickers
* Menu structures
* Login and navigation
* Text fonts
Look deeper under the hood and you will see consistency in smaller things like
* How to recognize mandatory fields and document identifiers
* What type of fields default and under what conditions
* How does one delete, modify or view a record
* What referential integrity checks should be done during deletion
* How can one export data or send trigger mails
* How are additional business rules or logic added
Many products are built without an underlying platform. However once customer and industry specific variations occur, it is almost impossible to keep adding to the product without affecting the underlying consistency and architecture. It is like building a house without a foundation. The wise man built his house on a rock - or in today's terms a good foundation. Take any product that has succeeded over a long period of time SAP, Oracle, Peoplesoft - all of them have a good foundation.
The KServe products (www.KServe.net) are all built on the same underlying platform. Take a look at CRM, HCM or our ERP products - they will have consistency and a uniform architecture. This is because we built a strong foundation. The foundation is proven across many customers, and so all our products are proven. You only have to verify if the process covered is relevant to your business and be sure that the application will stand the rigor of rugged usage by enterprise users.
Platform, software product, foundation, KServe
Friday, October 31, 2008
A good stress buster for HR & Payroll executives
Every HR department is usually stressed out at the end of a period. Leave statements to be finalized, attendance values to be tallied, payroll to be processed, benefits statements to be processed, statutory employee declarations, and numerous other aspects to be tied up.
So what are the usual stress busters? Choices are ..Automate it, outsource it or decentralize it.
* Automating it helps crunching numbers, but a lot of effort goes into avoiding the garbage in- garbage out syndrome.
* Outsource it - works well if you are willing to pay for it, and willing to work to give the data to the provider correctly.
* Decentralizing it by giving different HR executives responsibilities - works well if you have a lot of resources
Here is another way we recommend. Self service it. The employee enters the source data, the supervisor approves it and HR just reconciles the difficult issues if any. The self service HR application generates the rest of the statements automatically and delivers it to the employee. This by far is the most productive method with the least effort, highest output, greatest transparency and makes employees the happiest.
Easy choice? - well you still have to implement the right Self Service HR for your environment. At Kallos we are focusing on making KServe HCM the best among the available choices for employee self service. (www.KServe.net\hcm)
So what are the usual stress busters? Choices are ..Automate it, outsource it or decentralize it.
* Automating it helps crunching numbers, but a lot of effort goes into avoiding the garbage in- garbage out syndrome.
* Outsource it - works well if you are willing to pay for it, and willing to work to give the data to the provider correctly.
* Decentralizing it by giving different HR executives responsibilities - works well if you have a lot of resources
Here is another way we recommend. Self service it. The employee enters the source data, the supervisor approves it and HR just reconciles the difficult issues if any. The self service HR application generates the rest of the statements automatically and delivers it to the employee. This by far is the most productive method with the least effort, highest output, greatest transparency and makes employees the happiest.
Easy choice? - well you still have to implement the right Self Service HR for your environment. At Kallos we are focusing on making KServe HCM the best among the available choices for employee self service. (www.KServe.net\hcm)
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Employee Portals - Improving service levels and lowering HR executive to employee ratios
Every VP of HR asks this question. Do I really need so many executives to ensure that employees are satisfied. Can we provide good service without having to add more resources?
An Employee Portal may be the right answer. Until now such solutions were not so popular since a good percentage of employees needed to have access to a system for it to be successful. Now PC's on every desktop is almost a way of life. Even in manufacturing situations, an easily accessible kiosk is not expensive at all.
Just think about a typical HR transaction in a conventional HR environment for lets say a leave approval cycle.
An employee asks the executive for their leave eligibility and balance
Fills out the request form
Approaches the supervisor a couple of times before the supervisor approves it
The form is manually then submitted to the HR function
The HR executive enters the data in the HR application
Leave is processed at the end of the period
In a self service environment
The employee makes the leave application without a mistake - since the software validates the policy and the holidays
The alert on the supervisors login triggers him/her to approve it
At the end of the period the leave report is automatically available
The self service environment would involve probably one third the effort of the conventional application for the employee and the HR person. Add all the transactions for attendance, claims, benefit balances, IT and payroll queries etc. and one can immediately see the savings in effort for all the employee and the HR executives - and that directly translates to higher productivity for the company. In Employee portal environments, 500 employees being served well by one Executive is common. In non-automated environments the number could be between 50 and 200 depending on the complexity of the HR environment.
Employee portals provide ROI in months - if the right product and implementation is done right. Equally important is the fact that it brings transparency, equity, responsiveness and speed to the whole process.
And that is what we at Kallos intend that our KServe HCM software (http://www.kserve.net/hcm) suite does - To take human capital management beyond the use of the HR function and serve the employee well.
An Employee Portal may be the right answer. Until now such solutions were not so popular since a good percentage of employees needed to have access to a system for it to be successful. Now PC's on every desktop is almost a way of life. Even in manufacturing situations, an easily accessible kiosk is not expensive at all.
Just think about a typical HR transaction in a conventional HR environment for lets say a leave approval cycle.
An employee asks the executive for their leave eligibility and balance
Fills out the request form
Approaches the supervisor a couple of times before the supervisor approves it
The form is manually then submitted to the HR function
The HR executive enters the data in the HR application
Leave is processed at the end of the period
In a self service environment
The employee makes the leave application without a mistake - since the software validates the policy and the holidays
The alert on the supervisors login triggers him/her to approve it
At the end of the period the leave report is automatically available
The self service environment would involve probably one third the effort of the conventional application for the employee and the HR person. Add all the transactions for attendance, claims, benefit balances, IT and payroll queries etc. and one can immediately see the savings in effort for all the employee and the HR executives - and that directly translates to higher productivity for the company. In Employee portal environments, 500 employees being served well by one Executive is common. In non-automated environments the number could be between 50 and 200 depending on the complexity of the HR environment.
Employee portals provide ROI in months - if the right product and implementation is done right. Equally important is the fact that it brings transparency, equity, responsiveness and speed to the whole process.
And that is what we at Kallos intend that our KServe HCM software (http://www.kserve.net/hcm) suite does - To take human capital management beyond the use of the HR function and serve the employee well.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Why blog on KServe HCM?
As the founder of the company that brought out the K-Serve HCM Suite, there are two primary reasons for this blog.
Firstly, there is a need to bring out the details of the 'silent' revolution that is occurring in Human Resources centric Enterprise applications. The extension of the HR/Payroll product directly to its end users in the form of Employee Portals or Employee Self Service is making HR 'n' times more useful to organization compared to the earlier 'Ivory Tower' applications that was restricted for use only by the HR function. In addition, the inherent affordability of a new generation of HR solutions built on more robust and rapid development platforms is changing the landscape of such solutions.
I would also like to bring out our experiences in being a part of this revolution through our HCM suite 'K-Serve'. The joys of conceptualizing, developing, delivering and seeing constructive change in end user organizations brings satisfaction to all of us at Kallos - the company that brought out 'K-Serve' Enterprise products
I hope to highlight real world situations where HCM and Employee Portals can make a major difference, to dispel myths, to communicate HR solutions in a positive light, and yet be realistic in what it can do for your company.
Looking forward to your comments.
George Vettath
Founder, Kallos Solutions & the K-Serve range of Enterprise products
www.KServe.net/hcm
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