Implementation of HR Technology helps in streamlining HR processes, reducing overheads and reduces time taken to generate reports/information. Following are the excerpts from an interview with Shyaam Sunder K, Practice Head - HCM, Ramco Systems

What benefits should companies expect from implementing HR Technology? What are the mechanisms to track those benefits?

HR Technology aids in ensuring that processes in companies are executed in a consistent manner. By monitoring access and actions upon these technologies, and critically assessing its use, one can improve consistency in usage.
Implementing HR Technology is an opportunity to revisit the roles and responsibilities around HR processes. This should help identify and eliminate duplication of roles and tasks, and the disparities in the style of execution which will in turn reduce overheads. Post implementation, it will be possible to measure the cost to run the HR process. Cost Heads are typically people and infrastructure and organizations should benefit from cost reductions.

Also giving system access to employees through self service ensures that employees transact on their own and get their own answers. Post implementation, the number of calls HR Department receives for support, and the time taken to service these calls should be practically nil.

The time taken to generate reports and information is easily measurable-what was time and effort taken to generate a set of reports before and after the implementation? Reports are available real time.

How can one assess which product and delivery system fits the requirement of the company? What is your recommendation for those looking for the right fit?

It is imperative to first understand your HR goals and targets – these should be broken up as HR functions to be automated, reports to be delivered, process owners and information recipients. A good way would be to draw up a hierarchy of goals, programs to achieve those goals, processes and deliverables that fit those programs, etc.
It is also important to understand your company’s IT goals – what does the IT landscape look like today and how should it evolve. What are the technologies employed today? What is going to be phased out and what is going to be upgraded.
It is also vital to gather what skills and resources are available today and what is their path of evolution, and what skills must be acquired, purchased, or contracted.

How would you define Human Capital Management (HCM) and employee talent/skill management?

Human Capital Management is a strategic focal point in any organization. It seeks to create people capacities, and align these capacities to suit the organization’s goals, with sound risk control and reward programs. It cuts across the strategic business units of an organization, supporting it by successfully executing processes such as recruitment, training, performance appraisal and succession management.

Talent Management is a program that seeks to identify the generic attributes of successful people and then executing a program that is targeted toward ensuring a prevalence of these attributes in the organization. Processes such as recruitment, behavioral training, employee elections, succession and career management support talent management program.

What role does Human Capital Management play in shaping the organization?

The HCM function plays a strategic role - business leaders see themselves as Human Capital Managers.

Ideally, the style and criticality of the HCM function, and therefore the role that it plays, depends on the coordinates of the organization in the business lifecycle. A start-up is perhaps more centrally administered with knowledge of the ‘how’ being known to very few people. Here HCM plays an administrative role as the need of the hour is people who execute the strategies in a controlled manner.

As the organization transitions into the growth phase, the HCM function can start to run talent management programs that will help the organization in acquiring necessary capabilities for business success.

In the maturity phase, it monitors what should be well-established processes and bolsters its efforts in de-risking the organization from people perspective by putting together a succession management program.

What should an organization look for in an HR Technology vendor?

Vendor selection has always had the same bases: proven expertise in delivery, fit of the technology to the organization, and finally the ownership parameters such as money outflow to acquire the solution and the time frame. Customers sometimes go beyond this to look at some additional capabilities like product or people capacities, tools, etc. Obsolescence of technology and portability are other factors in this complex decision, though these are eventual issues.
Customers should critically evaluate a vendor on their ability to deliver the IT experience that they are looking for while harnessing a globe of resources. An IT experience is a function of the product content, people, processes and the associated technologies.

What business value does Ramco offer to its customers?

Ramco Human Capital Management Solution (HCM) manifests itself in the form of product documents, business rules, workflow and reporting. Given the platform based delivery methodology, the product can be implemented as it is, or configured to deliver organization specific behaviors. Thus the basic goals of HR like process streamlining, establishing controls (statutory or otherwise), and employee-business alignment is achieved.

What is a realistic cost saving that will be derived from implementation of HR Technology?

From Ramco’s experience, tangible cost savings can be measured in three parts:

1. Query Handling Efficiencies through ESS: In an organization with 1000+ employees for instance, the HR department services 20,000 – 30,000 queries annually. Assuming that each query takes an average 15 minutes to service, a maximum of 7500 Person-Hours of time can be saved. The monetary equivalent can be assessed depending on the people costs. Managerial self-service (records managers can access) helps improve the decision making process as information availability is real time and accuracy is assured largely. This leads to tremendous saving in cost, though difficult to quantify at times.

2. Reporting: Reports and information can be published real time at the touch of a button. Thus, if a report is needed 10 times in a year and it takes 7 minutes to generate the report, post implementation, this time is completely cut. An organization with 1000 + employees will use 100+ reports each of which would take at least 10 minutes to generate. This time is fully cut after a system is put in place.

3. Electronic Publications from the HR Department: The system enables the automatic publication of documents such as the training calendar (general to all employees) or KPI (specific to individual employees). These processes can also be automated and FTE cuts are possible here to.

4. Error Minimization: Record errors can be cut down by the validations, both functional (say of Salary) and technical. Though this is difficult to measure, Ramco’s implementation (apart from the standard validations it also performs customer specific validations) has been seen to correct Payroll, especially in involved computations such as incentive and provident fund, improving Payroll accuracy. If one were to account for the legal liabilities associated with erroneous payroll payouts, the ROI in this can be easily ajudged.

5. Best Practices and Workflow: Knowing the availability of a skill is another important measure. Internal succession is cheaper than recruitment. This statement is almost axiomatic. Thus, in system such as Ramco HCM, vacancies announced can be examined for internal succession, before raising a Hire Indent. This is just an example of how the base product workflow and its best practices can help cut costs by influencing decision makers to consider options that save the organization; time and money. Another example is the goal cascading process, which help the oragnization assign perforamnce goals to employees that are line with management expectations. All the 110 components in the solution are founded in such best practices.

Apart from this, there are intangible returns such improved employee morale etc.