Employee Life Cycle Management: The Center piece of a good HRMS/HRIS

Do you recall the days when every employee had a physical file? A quick glance at that file would give you a rich source of information about when the employee joined, when he or she was confirmed, promotions, transfers, increments, commendation letters, termination letters and much more. The only problem was that if you wanted to know how many promotions were given in a year, you would have to go through all employee files to get that information. If the files where maintained in another location, if would mean asking someone there for search it for you. It is great that HRMS software available now can make life simpler, and allow HR to manage more employees easily.

You would expect that any HR and Payroll system would therefore include an Employee Life Cycle recording and reporting feature in their product. Yet there are numerous products without this feature. In the rush to ensure that an employee database exists and payroll can be processed, the availability of an online recording system of life cycle events as and when they occur is missed out. And when that is missed out, the wheels of the HRMS software goes missing. Soon the system degenerates to inaccurate data, delayed information to payroll and other complications. Just how important this piece is can be judged by how many other modules are impacted because of the presence of a life cycle management module. Whenever an Employee Life Cycle event occur, the following occurs too.

• The employee database becomes uptodate when a life cycle event occurs. Any confirmation, promotion, transfer, or termination automatically updates the employee database.
• Most life cycle events causes a change in remuneration and updates payroll automatically.
• Any time a life cycle event takes place, an equivalent letter needs to be printed out, formally conveying to the employee that the event has occurred and the date from which the event becomes effective.
• The impact on remuneration has an immediate impact on benefits like PF and ESI applicable to the employee, and the statutory reporting related to these benefits
• The impact of remuneration also has an impact on income tax calculations and deductions
• Leave policies may become different as an employee moves location, becomes confirmed, or changes grade
• A movement of location, office, office or department has an impact on related HR activities like performance appraisals and training
• A retrospective life cycle event can also occur (e.g. a promotion with retrospective effect), which in turn affects all of the above, also with retrospective effect, and calculation of arrears
• The resulting values of most HR reports change as and when a life cycle event happens

Clearly, life cycle management is the heart of any HR system. Rethink the capability of your HRMS/ HRIS system if you don’t have this capability.

At KServeHRMS Employee Life cycle is a key module in the system. All the above features and much more exists.

For more information visit www.KServeHRMS.com

Can your HRMS/ HRIS pass this pressure test?

Organizations are realizing that winning the war for talent, is the key to business success, and winning that war for talent requires Automated HR Systems. However, it is not enough to pick a well known product, but rather subject your HRMS provider with a ‘pressure test’ that is relevant for your organization and for Indian conditions. Given below are some pressure test features and capabilities that you can ask for.

• Can you handle an extreme situation where an employee receives a promotion, an increment, and a transfer with retrospective effect a few months back, and also pay the arrears for these changes this month, and make sure that while doing so all the PF, ESI, Income Tax, Professional Tax and Labour Welfare Fund related calculations are calculated correctly?
  
• Can the product be implemented in a modular manner, and yet work in an integrated fashion across all the HR areas like Employee Life Cycle Management, Payroll, Leave and Attendance, Income Tax, Performance Appraisals, Recruitment, Training, Employee Self Services, HR Administration, Travel etc.
  
• If you have many companies and locations and in every location there are many new joinees, separations, transfers, promotions and loss of pay due to leave, is it possible for all these locations to update/upload these transactions at the respective locations itself online, and process payroll & leave balances accurately – either at a central location or in a decentralized manner?
  
• Can employees themselves perform self service transactions like leave requests and approvals, infrastructure support, view bulletin boards, make complaints, record claims, make IT declarations, make projections of their tax liability based on declarations, past and expected future income for the financial year?
  
• In case there is a process that is unique and critical to your organization (e.g. recruitment using agents) will the vendor be willing to adapt the product to accommodate this change within reasonable costs and timeframes?
  
• Can you handle variable pay by uploading data from spreadsheets that are used to calculate those values?
  
• Has the product been used by at least 20 customers, and are these referenceable?
  
• Do you have a structured implementation methodology, with templates for quick loading of past data?
  
• Does the product have productivity tools for configuring new pay elements, report building, view building, alert definition, mail triggers, code definitions that you can define yourself?
  
• Are the consultants who visit you knowledgeable on HR and payroll specific processes relevant from India?
  
• If some processes are outsourced, can you give access to the external party over the internet, yet ensure that security is maintained and the outsourced party can do only what they are supposed to do?

Questions like these separate the wheat from the chaff, and go a long way to ensure that you have a chosen a product that can become the backbone of your HR services internally. Choose a good set of pressure test questions, and leverage them well during the evaluation.

KServeHRMS.com will of course comply with all of the above and many more such pressure test cases. We have invested over 30 person years of effort since 2003 to get the product to where it is today, and we will continue to invest so that we stay among the best HRMS products in the country.

This whitepaper will also be useful if you want to know more about how to plan to implement Integrated HRMS systems.

A guide to decisions in automating HR & Payroll functions

A white paper I wrote, leveraging my 25 years of experience in Enterprise Applications (including HR Automation)

Synopsis

HR automation can range from simple spreadsheet based solutions to complex enterprise wide solutions that automate every single process of the HR function. The automation can also extend to employees and even sourcing partners using self service portals. This paper looks at the various levels of sophistication that organizations have typically automated within this wide spectrum, and articulates the benefits that occur when the organizations take leaps through these various levels of sophistication. Organizations can leverage this paper to identify their current level of automation and determine if the benefits associated with a level of sophistication warrants the investment return for the chosen investment leap.

Click here to download white paper on 'A guide to decisions in automating HR & Payroll Operations.

The next sensible transition in HRMS systems – SaaS & Cloud based Employee Portals plus Integrated HRMS

Having an integrated HR system with self service access to all employees is usually something only that big companies could afford to have. It was not just the question of having software in areas like Employee Life Cycle Management, Leave & Attendance, Payroll, Performance Appraisals, Training or Recruitment integrated into one integrated application – it also required data to be uptodate and online. Employees accessing the system would expect the system to be accurate, correct and usable for their operational needs.

The Cloud is changing that. Expensive software is now affordable and it can be bought on SaaS (Software as a Service) pay as you mode or you could buy the software for exclusive use. This enables smaller organizations to deploy Integrated Employee self service applications. This new generation of solutions are intrinsically designed for use on browsers and also for self learning and self implementation. Suitable implementation methodologies and upload data utilities will enable you to transition from older legacy applications to the latest very quickly. It is like moving from landlines directly to the latest smart phone or tablet without having to go through the intermediate stages. Employee and HR productivity go up significantly with the use of such systems.

At www.KServeHRMS.com we have made cloud based Employee Portals & Integrated HRMS a reality for many organizations. Being among the first to make available a web ready integrated HRMS product it allowed us to make the transition to the cloud and to employee portals fairly fast.

If you are evaluating such systems here are some overriding decision points you need to consider while looking for vendors

Is the solution ready for the web and the cloud? All other types of applications are going to be legacy soon
Are all the HRMS modules present and integrated. Without an integrated HRMS you will end up with duplicate work for each area, and also give a wrong picture to employees.
Is the software is easy to use and startup?. Employees and supervisors should intrinsically be able to use the application without much training.

For more information about our Employee Self Service products visit www.KServeHRMS.com or www.KServeOnline.com

When HR software products dont fit your business, platform based solutions are the way to go

Some verticals like manufacturing are blessed to have products that fit their business processes to a high degree, and Enterprise Application products make a lot of sense for them. Similarly a standard HR or Financial applications make sense for smaller companies since business processes are common across organizations. One can leverage the best practices,economies of scale as well as ruggedization that products have undergone and gain from it.

However, if you are in a vertical where its rare to find products that fits your business or HR processes, or worse still if you are in a business where the operational processes keep changing, products can be dangerous for your business. Its common knowledge that if product fitment levels are low then you should avoid customizing the product since it can break down the architecture and become incredibly expensive to maintain.

But what are the options in front of such organizations? Custom solutions take too long. The answer lies in platform based solutions. In the past three to four years a number of scalable and rapid development platforms have appeared in the market. These allow organizations to quickly mash smaller applications meant for fulfilling a localized need. Force.com has been succesful in providing good extensions to salesforce.com. Longjump and Coghead are some other companies. These products would come under the category of PaaS.

Are these platforms good for mainstream applications on which enterprises run? The answer is yes, but one would need a Mainstream Platform as a Service (MPaaS - a term I coined for this) provider to do this. An MPaaS solution has a mainstream product, as well as a very rapid application development environment to enable customers leverage the core product for the backbone areas like HR or financials and the platform to deliver the unique processes that are operationally dynamic. While numerous vendors will promise to do this, the ones that can be truly classified as MPaaS are ones who

Have already delivered ERP class products to a market using the platform
Can deliver rugged and power packed modules as extensions in short timeframes
Can offer unique methodologies where customers can see what they are going to get for the unique processes very early in the development cycle.
Can build massive applications that span the Enterprise in short timeframes

At KServe (http://www.kserve.net/) we continue to focus on Mainstream PaaS. The link below points to a case study of a construction company that leveraged this approach when their product approach did not work out. An end to end solution was delivered this company for their operations in a years time.

http://www.kserve.net/pdf/KServe%20ERP%20enables%20Dodla%20Engineering%20go%20100%20percent%20%20online.pdf

We have also fine tuned a methodology to delivery such solutions to customers - and this link gives more details about its success.

http://www.kserve.net/Enterprise_KServe_Apps.html

In my next blog I will expand on the methodology and how it can revolutionize the way software is delivered worldwide.

Little HR developmental work possible without a good base HR and Payroll system

As a progressive HR person you want to do a lot of things for your company from a development perspective. However, once the number of employees in your company crosses a certain size, you cannot do many activities manually for sheer reasons of the effort involved. That is when you would have wished you had a computerized HR and Payroll system as a basic infrastructure. Some of development activities you will find difficult to do are

· Perform analysis on the profile/ demographics of employees
· Track the skills of employees and keep updating them when they get trained
· Performance Tracking at regular intervals
· Track the history of employees through their lifecycle in the company
· Salary Planning keeping in mind budgets available for increases
· Tax Planning/ optimization for employees
· Employee Self Service for Leave, Appraisal Management, Payslips, Benefit Balances etc.
· Achieve good multi-locational operations of HR processes without complications, delays and inaccuracies
· Track Loans and Advances provided to employees
· Keep track of Employees benefits paid and dues from respective agencies
· Recruit many people quickly with a good resume back of people you may need later

Don’t get caught on the wrong foot. Get a good HR and Payroll system in place. Be foresighted enough to buy a product that has many add on modules in advanced areas like Performance Management, Recruitment, Training, Resource Management, Self-Service etc. Buy a product that can work in a multi-locational basis preferably over your intranet and yet can be implemented in stages. At KServe we try our best to be a model HCM product (www.KServe.net/hcm/ www.Kserve.net/payrollhrod ) and meet all the above recommendations

Payroll/ PF& ESI (Benefits) processing OnDemand - Costs, Effort & Time cut drastically

Even if your company has only 20 employees, processing payroll is complex. Collection, aggregation and validation of the following is a laborious task
- Attendance
- Leave
- Employee Joining and Separation
- Employee Salary Changes
- One time payments
- Arrears
- Tax Relief impact
- Impact of Statutory Changes in the above
- Optimization in Tax

Validating it and then delivering it to
- Employees
- Benefits Providers
- Banks for payment
- Other statutory agencies

We eliminated most of this complexity by providing the following in KServe HR&Payroll OnDemand
- Hosted it on the internet in self service/ Software as a Service (SaaS) mode
- Made it affordable for even small companies to have an automated payroll with a small monthly fee
- Eliminated the need to buy infrastructure like hardware, operating systems and licensed software
- Made loading employees, salary structure and payroll loading a 2 step process using easy to use spreadsheets
- Provided direct access to all the key roles in the process i.e. the people responsible for validating all the above, even if they are in different locations
- Delivered the above in a form where it can be given directly to employees, Banks, Benefits providers and other statutory providers
- Provided a hosted HR system free along with the payroll

KServe Ondemand HR/Payroll is proven for the Indian environment with the payroll of thousands of employees already being processed.

For more information visit http://www.Kserve.net/payrollhrod.html

Check the prices out and find out how much costs, time and effort you can save compared to your current arrangement. You can register for a trial directly. This is the way payroll is going to be processed in the future and we expect the change to become a mass movement soon.

At KServe our commitment to keep delivering value to customers continues to be our motto

Translating Corporate Objectives to the operational appraisal system

Great plans and strategies finally boil down good execution. Strategic goals have to finally come down to a balanced performance scorecard that percolates down to tangible objectives and measures for individuals. Unclear operational objectives in individual minds lead to uneven results at all levels.

How? Break down the corporate balanced score card goals down to specific operational objectives and measures to individuals. Document these by setting the objectives right in the begining of the period, and at the end of the period evaluate every one. The appraisal can be self appraised, supervisor appraised and if you are advanced may be even a 360 degree one. But the process is important. It sets expectations, evaluates fairly and keeps a track record. It shows results and it is something every professional organization cannot live without.

Practical problem: How does one keep track of the objectives and measures of all employees, set them, get the results, obtain the comments and the ratings, and maintain a history of them.

Regular Solution: Store the results in your HR application.

World Class Solution : Serve your appraisals through a self service/ employee portal where the appraisal is routed to individuals and their supervisors. Each person fills in the appraisals based on the roles and the routing, completes the process. HR only needs to initiate the process and the rest gets done automatically.

Is it affordable? World class routing based self service appraisals are very expensive. We at K-Serve have been working on it for years so that finally Self Service based appraisal is no longer exotic - its the regular thing to do and it is affordable.
Visit us at http://www.blogger.com/www.KServe.net to know more.

HR Systems – are they at the right level of maturity?

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.

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

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.

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