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

A good stress buster for HR & Payroll executives

Every HR department is usually stressed out at the end of a period. Leave statements to be finalized, attendance values to be tallied, payroll to be processed, benefits statements to be processed, statutory employee declarations, and numerous other aspects to be tied up.

So what are the usual stress busters? Choices are ..Automate it, outsource it or decentralize it.

* Automating it helps crunching numbers, but a lot of effort goes into avoiding the garbage in- garbage out syndrome.

* Outsource it - works well if you are willing to pay for it, and willing to work to give the data to the provider correctly.

* Decentralizing it by giving different HR executives responsibilities - works well if you have a lot of resources

Here is another way we recommend. Self service it. The employee enters the source data, the supervisor approves it and HR just reconciles the difficult issues if any. The self service HR application generates the rest of the statements automatically and delivers it to the employee. This by far is the most productive method with the least effort, highest output, greatest transparency and makes employees the happiest.

Easy choice? - well you still have to implement the right Self Service HR for your environment. At Kallos we are focusing on making KServe HCM the best among the available choices for employee self service. (www.KServe.net\hcm)