South African organisations face enormous challenges in improving efficiencies and cost control in their HR departments, says Ashley Regenass, Synergy Group CEO. One common problem is that HR departments spend too much time on administrative tasks and managing compliance at the expense of supporting managers in developing employee potential.
Another issue is that managers lack visibility into employee productivity and cost, which leads to poor estimates of labour costs in turn and eroding profits and competitiveness. For many mid-market enterprises, much of the difficulty in taking more control over the HR function lies in the fact that they rely on poorly integrated systems and cumbersome business processes.
These are all challenges we are grappling with inside our own business, which is why we have decided to implement Sage HR Management to modernise our HR processes and business systems. We looked at five core requirements for a new solution before we made our choice.
1. Modern technology platform
Understanding that we wanted to take advantage of the latest trends such as mobility, we needed a business solution with a modern architecture. It would need to be flexible and modular, allowing us to introduce new features and functionality at a pace that would be comfortable for our business. It would also need to be simple and fast to implement and configure.
2. Integration
Too many mid-sized businesses still store HR data in siloes. Outdated HR systems with loose or no integration with accounting and ERP systems create inefficiencies across the organisation and hamper visibility into business trends. The tight integration of Sage ERP X3 and Sage HR Management was, therefore, a big plus for us as a Sage ERP X3 user. A company with unified financial and HR data benefits from accurate and exhaustive data for all its employees, and this is core to improving productivity.
With Sage HR Management, we'll have a complete HR solution that integrates with our ERP system, giving us a real-time view into HR productivity and costs.
That's critically important to us, since we are a consulting firm and our people's time and expertise is the main product we sell. An integrated HR package will also help us reduce the need to recapture data across functions such as payroll, hiring, on-boarding and retaining talent, and statutory reporting, says Regenass.
3. Tighter control
We wanted to empower our managers with unified HR and financial data that would allow them to forecast present and future costs while streamlining operations with automated workflows. Thus, we looked for a solution that automates processes from end to end. Sage HR Management also provides powerful tools for managing workflows and enforcing business rules.
4. Better compliance and visibility
Gaining visibility of HR performance is a growing challenge, especially for mid-sized businesses. A related challenge is statutory reporting. We wanted a solution that would provide a global, accurate real-time view of HR budget, workforce costs and performance, enabling faster, better-informed operational decisions. With its dashboards and analytic tools, Sage HR Management will give us greater visibility into the business so we can make better decisions.
It will also support us in managing internal processes as well as storing and accessing critical documentation.
5. Employee engagement
Companies around the world agree that employee engagement is vital, and especially so in an industry such as ours where the best skills are in high demand. For us, implementing an HR solution should therefore focus as much on HR service delivery as it does on improving efficiencies. Sage HR Management will give us powerful tools such as self-service HR services (via the Web or a mobile device) for ensuring higher employee retention and engagement. It will also help us to manage employee development with faster and simpler access to skills and performance information.
We considered it especially important to give managers mobile access to key performance indicators and operational performance data, providing Web access to core HR data to managers - on any device and on any browser - giving them the freedom to take decisions from any location.
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