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.

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

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.