What Web 2.0 and SaaS Software offer that Legacy ERPs do not provide?

October 27th, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

In the last few years, Web 2.0 and SaaS have captured a significant portion of the market led by legacy ERP systems. Even large enterprises (which only showered their love on ERPs) are now accepting the value of SaaS application over legacy ERPs.

A survey about SaaS conducted in August 2009 by Business Week Research Services found that four out of five managers and senior executives in North America are either interested in, or in the process of, adopting the Software as a Service approach to information technology. In fact, roughly a third of the 326 respondents’ companies have already fully or partially adopted the SaaS approach for at least one application. Read more …

What is in SaaS that is enticing senior executives from all streams of management (IT, finance, HR or S&M), apart from cost benefits?  Talent Junction explores eight key features of SaaS applications that are usually missing in traditional ERP software.

1. Usability: Web 2.0 SaaS software cares much more for usability than its older cousin ERP did. Vendors have understood the value of usability to end-users and are committing more budgets in analyzing the user behavior while working with the software.

Using this analysis, developers continually re-engineer the design to make it more usable. Menu structures, buttons, messages, user interface, and even application colors are chosen keeping web conventions in mind.

Read more about usability from expert Jacob Neilson.

2. Intuitive Graphic User Interface: SaaS and Web 2.0 applications are far more intuitive than legacy ERP systems. The actions, buttons, messages, etc. communicate to users in a way that most can understand what to do next. Graphics, images, and icons all are designed to convey meaningful and user-friendly messages.

The intuitive interface of SaaS application significantly reduces training needs. Thus, for large organizations, where training multiple teams requires big budgets, SaaS applications are a money-saver.

I would love to share a comment from a happy customer who uses SaaS application for Performance Management “We made the decision to roll this out without any training. Our employees took to it without any effort. We did so without any special training for employees. They all found it easy to manage and intuitive. We’re very happy with the end result.” Read the complete comment here…

3. Collaboration: With the advent of social media and its impact on businesses, collaboration is seen as a tool to develop social learning within the organization. Web 2.0 and SaaS software is significantly advanced in terms of facilitating collaboration among the user community. These applications allow users to share insights, comments, notes, references, and documents within the user groups. The use of such applications not only improves employee productivity but also enhances social learning within the organization.  Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in HR Best Practices, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS) | 4 Comments »

Web-based HRIS helps in FMLA Compliance

September 1st, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

Introduction: This blog post mentions the benefits of using an HR Software (also called recordkeeping software) in maintaining compliance with FMLA, a law in United States about family and medical leaves. It is important for HR, CEO and CFO to know about FMLA law as employers in US have lost millions of dollars in FMLA violations.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is an act in United States that provides certain employees of an organization with up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave per year. It also requires that employers maintain the group health benefits to the employees during the leave period. FMLA is designed to help employees balance their work and family responsibilities by allowing them to take reasonable unpaid leave for certain family and medical reasons.

More information on the act can be found at Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) but broadly the act requires that covered employers must grant an eligible employee up to a total of 12 work-weeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period for one or more of the following reasons:

1. for the birth and care of the newborn child of the employee;
2. for placement with the employee of a son or daughter for adoption or foster care;
3. to care for an immediate family member (spouse, child, or parent) with a serious health condition;
4. or to take medical leave when the employee is unable to work because of a serious health condition.

Additionally the final rule extends the coverage for eligible specified family members,

1. Up to 12 weeks of leave for certain qualifying exigencies arising out of a covered military member’s active duty status, or notification of an impending call or order to active duty status, in support of a contingency operation, and
2. Up to 26 weeks of leave in a single 12-month period to care for a covered service member recovering from a serious injury or illness incurred in the line of duty on active duty. Eligible employees are entitled to a combined total of up to 26 weeks of all types of FMLA leave during the single 12-month period.

The other general conditions that makes an employee eligible for FMLA are:

• If they have worked for their employer for at least 12 months, and have worked for at least 1,250 hours over the previous 12 months,
• and work at a location where at least 50 employees are employed by the employer within 75 miles.

There are several requirements to be fulfilled by the employee / employer for FMLA. For more information visit US Department of Labor website http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/fmla/.
The biggest cause of worry for employers is that FMLA has long been a source of litigations.

Employers have lost millions of dollars in FMLA violations. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in FMLA, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources | 7 Comments »

Strategic Benefits of Online Leave Management System

July 23rd, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

Leave Management is one of the most important HR processes, that consumes a small but significant portion of managerial time. While managers are usually overloaded with projects & hunger for resources, approving subordinates leaves is a tight rope walk. On one hand HR has to ensure compliance with leave policy & ensure availability of sufficient resources for business continuance; while on the other hand it has to improve employee satisfaction. Most of us have witnessed bitter manager-employee relation on issues of leaves. Thus, leave management becomes an important strategic task for the organization.

Strategic Value of Leave

While many companies may take the leave management “not so seriously”, research shows that poor leave management has had bad impact on business performance. It can impact project deliveries and employee morale negatively. Here are some of the critical business issues, that are directly related to leave management.

1. Meeting Project Delivery Deadlines: Availability of manpower directly impacts the project delivery schedules. While committing Project Delivery dates managers need to keep in mind the general availability of sufficient resources. They need to know what are the peak leave months/ weeks and should commit the delivery dates accordingly. Also, while crucial projects are nearing dead lines, they should approve leaves prudently.
2. Legal Issues with Leave: Each country has legal rules for employee leaves. Like FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) in United States - with its broad definition of medical conditions and generous leave provisions -it can scare employers, especially smaller companies who rely on a handful of key employees. Failing to comply with the complicated requirements of this law can result in serious liability for both companies and individuals. Similarly, in India THE FACTORIES ACT CHAPTER VIII, Annual Leave with Wages, lay clear guidelines for leaves. If organizations do not comply with these rules, they risk being sued by the employees and penalized by the Government Authorities.
3. Emotional Factors related to Leave: Getting leaves in time is a major employee satisfaction factor. Employees have several personal needs which requires their absence from work. Read our another post denying leaves can cause emotional stress, where we studied a case of mismanaged leave request.
4. Financial Implications of Leave: Accrued leaves are financial liabilities on organizations, especially Paid Time Offs and Privileged leaves which are to be reimbursed at the time of separation (or as and when required by employee ) according to the leave policy. If employees do not take enough leaves, the financial liability of organization increases and the HR should report this to management at regular intervals.
5. Performance Vs Leaves: Work Life Balance have a direct impact on an employee’s performance. Employees who do not take enough leaves (and suffer from stress) or the employee who takes too much leave (and is careless towards job), both have negative impact on their performance. Both type of employees need to be monitored carefully and coached on maintaining a productive work life balance.

Important Leave Metrics/ Dashboards that HR should keep an eye on:

Organizations need to capture and know several leave metrics at frequent intervals for a better understanding of its human resources.   Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in HR Best Practices, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources | 6 Comments »

Free Human Resources (HR) Software Download Facts

April 22nd, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

Free HR Software

Many visitors on EmpXtrack’s website come to look for Free HR software. Because there are many softwares in different domains that come for FREE, they expect that there can be a Free Human Resources Software too. This post will discuss “Is there any free lunch (software) at all?” for Human Resources Management. I will also try to bust the myths about the softwares that are available for Free.

Why HR Software is NOT free?

Let me begin with why there can’t be free software in HR Domain.

My first argument is that it takes lots of efforts to develop an HR Software, because an HR Software is not merely a plain database of employees information fields (like in an Excel Sheet or MS Access) but a large collection of various types of information which are linked to each other in a logical way so that an output can provide a Common Sense View about the employees.

If I need to define HR Software I will say “HR Software is a process for the collection, analysis, interpretation and presentation of employee’s data. It can provide tools for prediction and forecasting based on data. Thus it can be used for a wide variety of management decisions, financial decisions about manpower, performance of people, succession planning and removal of non-performers.” Such an important software, which provides a total MIS on human resources has to be created with great care. How can you get it for Free. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Employee Appraisals, Goal Setting, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources, Performance Management | 13 Comments »

What is a bigger problem: Managing employee appraisals or writing accurate appraisals?

December 24th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

While, I was organizing a software training workshop for a major Electric Power Distribution Corporation in New Delhi, I asked Vikram Singh, one of the participating Senior Managers, who has a team size of 150 employees for performance review, “What is the bigger problem when conducting employee appraisals: managing appraisals or writing accurate appraisals?“.

[Background: This 2,500 employee big company opted for EmpXtrack Performance Management System. Prior to using a web-based performance management system, they used paper based appraisal forms.]

“I have a team of 150 people to review, for me managing employee appraisals is a bigger problem. With an experience of 10 years, writing accurate appraisal is not so difficult. It may be difficult for younger managers but not for an experienced one.“, said Vikram. He continued, “For senior managers like me who also have to review appraisal of my juniors’ teams (I have 8 juniors managing teams of 15-20 each), managing appraisals is a far bigger problem. There is already a long list of urgent tasks with me and then managing 150 employee appraisals, usually in a span of 1 month. It makes me sweat.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Employee Appraisals, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources, Performance Management | 5 Comments »

Successfactors of a Leader – Remembering Names

December 10th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

Sometimes back I wrote a post ‘What’s in the name? SuccessFactors for HR‘ where I mentioned the special skill of an HR manager who knows every employee by name. While I was reviewing a new feature in the software EmpXtrack, called Employee Hierarchy (similar to an Organization Chart), I recollected a motivating incident.

It was in the beginning of year 2002, I worked with a business process outsourcing organization. One day I was working quite late and trying to finish a training project before leaving for the day. The Managing Director, Mr. Aashish, just passed by and saw me. Five minutes back, he came back to my desk and said ,”Hi Gireesh, why are you working so late today?” The rest was a normal chit chat.

This incident left me highly motivated for many months to come. I was amazed by the fact that my Managing Director knew me by name, while I was merely a grass-root level executive, almost a nobody in the organization which was 2500 big. Sometimes later I discussed this incident with my manager and he revealed that on seeing me working so late, MD has called him just to ask my name.

Later on a friend’s recommendation I read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. In this book Dale Carnegie (Section “Six Ways to Make People Like You”)says, “Remember that a man’s Name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”, which highlights how important it is to remember and call people by name.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in HR Best Practices, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources | 1 Comment »

SaaS gets its due recognition

August 14th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

It was refreshing to see the perspective of a leading monthly magazine DARE which talked about SaaS as a

way to lower IT costs. Makes me proud since we were covered as one of the top provider in HR. You can read about the article and even view the coverage here.

And to begin with, we faced our set of challenges too. Many companies are skeptical about security of data, continuous availability of Internet, bandwidth limitations, etc. but many have hopped across to try the new business model. Google’s soaring profits are a testimonial to this.

While reviewing my list of clients in India, I was surprised to see that almost 75% of our customers had adopted the SaaS way of doing things. And most of these companies are not really small. The smallest is about 30 employees (who are using us to manage their sales force) and the largest has over 3,500 employees using our system.

Continue to look here for a detailed cost-benefit-analysis of using the SaaS model vs. an outright purchase of software.==============

Posted in Goal Setting, HR Best Practices, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources, Performance Management | No Comments »