Self Service HR Automation gives your organization much more than surprisingly quick Return On Investment (ROI)

Traditionally automation of HR and Payroll are seen by organizations as a necessarily evil, an investment that has to be done from a statutory compliance perspective, or to ensure that payroll occurs on time. This was true, primarily because HR & Payroll applications were used only by HR and Payroll personnel as a back office operation. This situation changes drastically when HR Automation is made self service. Employees directly accessing HR self service systems gives organizations oodles of benefits and with it surprisingly quick ROI. A back of the envelope calculation here shows ROI in two months!

Of all the benefits the most important one is time saved by employees. Detailed below are many functions that are present in good self service HR products like ours (KServeHRMS) which employees can access without having to meet the HR function, saving them considerable time

• Leave request, cancellation, modification
• View Payslips
• Update address and personal details
• View bulletins
• Make claims
• Request for infrastructure or other support
• Update performance appraisals
• Make a complaint
• Submit a HR request (any other HR form)
• Make declarations on Income Tax
• Check your tax liabilities to optimize tax

 It is not just the time for making the request, but also the time taken to meet supervisors, wait for appointments, and go back and forth to verify balances before the approval is obtained. Now, for each of the above, consider also of the time saved by the supervisor in approving, rejecting or clarifying these requests. In addition, include the time saved by HR, Admin and Payroll personnel is automatically getting reports for all these automated processes.

Let us make the following assumptions to calculate ROI for an Indian context.

               

• These ‘click of a mouse function’ saves  a conservative 5 minutes of time for every employee in a day which is about 1% of an employees time (it will be much more for employees on the move)
• Let us assume the cost of every employee to the company (salaries plus overheads) is on average Rs. 50,000/-
• The savings per employee therefore is around 500 Rs per month (1%) or Rs 6000 per year.
• For 500 employees the savings is 2.5 lakhs per month or 30 lakhs per year

If this company spends 500,000/- on employee self service software for its 500 employees, the ROI will be obtained in 2 months after the system is operational. In advanced countries where salaries are higher, ROI is even better, but this is offset by higher software costs. The time for ROI can still be the same in any country.

Consider also the intangible benefits to the company due to employee satisfaction and brand building.

• Transparency in obtaining standard services
• Not having to stand in a queue to meet supervisors for approvals
• Immediate access to information like payslips, leave balances, IT dues enabling better decision making

The next argument is in terms of risk of success. The risk of success can easily be mitigated by verifying the past track record of the provider,  and if required choosing a SaaS model where the investment can be paid installments. There should be no reason for any organization with more than 200 employees not to use self service HR systems, especially if your employees are highly paid.

It is good to see many organizations realizing this and investing in a system.

 

At Kallos Solutions and KServeHRMS (www.KServeHRMS.com) it is our honor, and pleasure to have made these benefits accrue to many organizations so far.

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

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.