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.

People Centric organizations alert. Your HRMS is more important that your ERP

People centric organizations like Engineering, Consulting, ITES, and other Professional Services firms are rely on skill, talent, processes, and experience to stay ahead in business. Conventionally such firms have given very little importance to its core operational systems which are people centric rather than material driven. Recruitment, time management, performance appraisals and other workforce management software are critical to success. Given its criticality, most organizations have resorted to spreadsheets, or localized applications to cater to all these needs. Beyond a certain critical size such localized systems breakdown. Typical signs of such breakdown occurs when each localized system gives a different picture about employees. A simple real life event of 3 employees leaving and 2 new employees joining in a month may lead to disruption. Unless all these details are updated separately in all systems, the results will be wrong. Interrelated processes between HR processes become complex and unmanageable.

In such organizations, the need for online HR services via self service automation also becomes critical. It is almost impossible for HR to provide individualized service to employees on their myriad needs. The problem with Employee Self Service and Employee Portals are that they need to be integrated real time to back office systems which are real time and accurate – otherwise wrong data may be given to employees, definitely something to be avoided.

Organizations that have already implemented such systems report major improvements in employee productivity, satisfaction, higher work hours and higher billing hours – all of which contribute directly to the bottom line. Ask any successful people centric organization with over 1000 employees and they will tell you how critical such systems are to their organizations. They will vouch for the fact that the huge investments in consulting and product licenses have paid off not only in returns but also in the ability to scale to new heights.
The good news is that ESS based integrated HRMS is now much more affordable and India ready now. KServeHRMS.com for instance has 10 integrated modules, provides employee self service for over 20 employee touch points, is fully statutory compliant for PF, ESI, Professional Tax, Income Tax and LWF, is available on the Cloud as well as in-premise situations and yet affordable for relatively smaller organizations to use. Organizations with employee sizes as low as 100 employees are using such systems.
For more information visit www.KServeHRMS.com. This whitepaper will also be useful if you want to know more about how to plan to implement Integrated HRMS systems.