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.

Self Service Income Tax: Employees save more, Accounts save time

The responsibility of verifying personal and income based declarations, and calculating income tax is very cumbersome for most organizations, primarily because the interaction is personal and individualized. Income Tax payees are usually senior and middle management who are very demanding of their rights, knowing very well that good tax planning leads to direct savings. Unless automated in a self service mode, the amount of work involved for the accounts function is very high.This leads to high stress situations in the final months of the year when deductions usually go up and declarations come in at the last minute.

KServeHRMS has added an income tax module, with self service capability to its suite of products. This means that employees can give their declarations, and view their projections based on income and declarations made. KServe Payroll is integrated to the income tax module and hence recommended deductions can be posted to payroll. Actual pay and deductions are posted back to the tax module. Statutory reports related to Form 16 and Form 24 Q, with the breakup by employee can be taken out automatically. The module can be implemented individually also.

 

For more information on this module visit :

 

www.KServeHRMS.com/IndiaIncometax.html

The next thing in website design: The power of tiles and squares

Mobile and tablet user interface design is forcing conventional website designers to introspect. Form factors vary in PC’s, laptops, tablets, smartphones and regular phones. How does a website designer cater to all segments while designing the site?

The answer lies in the use of tiles, squares and largefonts.

Check out our site www.KServeHRMS.com before you proceed with the rest of the article.

• Squares are useful since they flex well in different form factors. Increases in length and breadth take place uniformly avoiding stretch
• Large fonts are useful since one could read the text in any device. Definitely a plus for those whose  eyesight is not perfect
• Tiles force brevity in a world where people scan through web pages in seconds

I don’t know if our site will earn awards from the creative world, but the design is definitely getting good reviews from our market. It was also fun creating it. 

Would love to get your feedback and views on such design.

PS – Am recording this in a blog because I have a feeling that many sites will follow suit and I hope that we are recognized as the ones that pioneered this form of design in June 2012!

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

Running your payroll on the web now makes far more sense - especially if you are an SME

Until recently it did not make sense running payroll on the web in India. One could get low cost applications to run locally on the PC, or one could outsource the work to numerous ‘consultants’ who would provide you services with respect to calculations, form preparation and filing. But there are some fundamental shifts occurring in web based payroll processing that would definitely warrant a relook at the way you are doing it.

1. Prices are now amazingly low – There are SaaS vendors out there who process payroll for as low as Rs. 2/- employee per month. In terms of comparison its even lower than the AMC charges of in-premise pc based products and possible one fourth the rates of what ‘consultants’ charge you.

2. They have become far more easy to operate – Web based providers focus on making it extremely easy for you to register and run the application on your own. Design is more like what you are used to in booking an airline ticket or buying something online. You now can allow your trusted hr and payroll executive to do the job on their own.

3. The benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS) kick in – SaaS gives you benefits of low rental costs of usage, avoiding the need to buy servers, operating systems, databases, security and antivirus, high speed lines. On the contrary prices of inpremise products are going up significantly as the cost of individually supporting each customer by visiting, updating and supporting versions is getting to costlier by the day.

4. Access from anywhere - You can now access the application from any browser based device from anywhere, just as you are used to logging into your bank account from anywhere. Users in multiple locations can update attendance and leave, payroll can be processed centrally and payslips printing or serving can be decentralized

5. HR comes free – Most good payroll SaaS providers give you a HR product to use free. Employee Self Service and other applications like reimbursements and performance management can be added on

6. Submit forms to statutory organizations directly – The day is not far when one can use the same software to file PF, ESI, Professional Tax, Income Tax directly from these systems. Most government agencies are enabling electronic submission.

Imagine a scenario where, changes in employee details like joinees, seperations, promotions and movements are done through the month, 5 remote locations upload their attendance\ leave spreadsheets on 31st, payroll is processed on 1st in 3 minutes, the bank is notified on the 1st, payslips are emailed to employees on 1st and the submissions to the government agencies are done automatically. This is a dream that can be achieved now.

KServeOnline HR and Payroll is doing just this. Visit http://www.KServeHRMS.com/SaaS.aspx

for more details. A free trial of 30 days enables you to see how user friendly it is. You can even run your first payroll yourself in 15 minutes if you have the data with you.