Tuesday 3 May 2016

Prove Your System’s Worth – Track HR Software’s ROI

When your company acquires an HR and Payroll System, the purchase and time investment is surely made with the expectation of seeing profits increase by one means or another.

Upper management that had a hand in supplying the capital and resources needed for acquisition and implementation will most likely ask for concrete evidence to show that the investment was a wise one. Actual profits and sales may or may not accurately reflect improvements, so it is important to devise a system that supplies other ways to present ROI.


Estimate Benefit Areas
When your company decided to get HR Software, chances are good that features were prioritized by expected cost and time savings. Instead of reinventing the wheel, use this prioritized list as a jumping off point for ROI tracking. Expand the list by estimating other areas in which the HR Software may save time and money, and then track those areas as well.

Go Back in Time
Not literally, although that would be great. Go back to past dates and compile reports of all of the features that you will be tracking so that you have a point of comparison when it comes time to measure progress. Go back a little ways and make sure that you have information from a few different time periods so that you can show that improvements are actually a result of the new HR Software and not just recurrent.

Calculate all HRIS Costs
In order to show that HR Software was a good investment, it is important to know how much that investment actually was. Add up all funds put towards software, paid for support, and put towards maintaining the solution. Add actual cost spent on implementation or wasted because of downtime and add this number to the HR Software cost.

Sit Back and Track
Most HR Software System make it easy to track and report things like time spent on specific tasks, so after the features that will be tracked have been specified, it is simply a waiting game. Let the system continually track the activities that you expect to improve because of the HR solution. Efficiency will generally increase as employees and managers get used to using the new system, so it is also important to show this progress.

Compare and Calculate Results
Compare the past reports and the new information to see if time or money has been saved in the expected areas. Perform calculations to determine the exact ROI to date, figuring labor cost into the equation. Don’t be discouraged if progress is slow or if results are not immediately visible, as an HR Software it is a long term investment that may take a while to pay off.

Use ROI Calculations for Future Changes
An ROI calculation should be seen as a tool to track progress, rather than as a final answer for whether or not the HRIS was a good investment. Tracking progress is sure to reveal areas that can-and should-be improved. When these areas are identified, the tracking systems that are already in place can show you the impact of changes that you make, allowing you to hone processes for ever greater efficiency and productivity.

Monday 18 April 2016

Does My Small Business Need an HR Software Solution ?

Over the years, the HR role within business organizations has diversified dramatically; it has now been tied to almost all company processes. This is especially more applicable to the smaller businesses which usually had to do without the HR role mostly due to the high costs. Irrespective of whether the role is held by a manager, the HR role requires sufficient technology to make it workable. Human resource involves tons of data and information but most small business owners rarely see the need to use HR software into the business. Sometimes, but rarely the disadvantages might outweigh the advantages.


Before you purchase HR software you should make an evaluation to determine whether your business needs the software. You have to be very brutal in your assessment. The assessment should involve all your organizations goals in terms of the preferred administrative time spent on various tasks, views on paperwork, record-keeping, data security, and reports, backup of information.
Each business tends to have varied views and organizational goals, and after the evaluation you have to ask yourself the following questions about your business.
  • Do you have the physical space to securely store all your paperwork?
  • Can you keep track of all benefits, training, workplace accidents, and disciplinary warnings?
  • How often do you get HR specific employee complaints?
  • Do you have a problem calculating time off accruals for sick days, gratuity and vacation time?
  • How many hours in a month do you devote to HR work? How many do you think would be the best for the organization?
  • Do have an easily accessible historical database of all your former and current employees.
  • Is there a means of recording employees’ performance evaluations alongside the management goals?
Once you have made the assessment of all your organizational goals and you have answered all these questions then you should have no problem determining whether HR software will be beneficial or not.

Remember, with functional HR software you can devote more time to achieving other organizational goals. HR involves lots of data, which a single person might not be able to handle, especially using paperwork alone. It can certainly turn out to be a cost cutting venture that can improve your efficiency irrespective of your staff size. HR software solutions are easy to use, easy to learn, easy to execute, and they are a great investment to streamline all your processes.

To know more please contact us.

Friday 18 March 2016

Fancy screens, most of them dont work in my hr and payroll software!

Just got oversold by a software solution provider a new HR package?

It is easy for anyone to be deceived into buying a software solution, purely based on looks assumptions.  You may have a very good interface which looks amazing, good color combinations, properly aligned screens, but you may realize sooner than later that it lacks basic fundamental operations for an HR Solution, so whats the point when they dont meet your needs of having a fancy interface.
 


We discuss shortcomings before advantages.  We are not sales driven, we are customer driven.  At HR Chronicle, we not only ensure that all requirements are taken before hand, even before start, we make sure expectation are clearly understood, addressed, delivered.  If we cant meet expectations we dont commit to the delivery, thats why we have a 100% project completion ratio for all HR Chronicle Implementations.

Want to know about HR Chronicle click here to know more.

HR Chronicle Mobile App is here

We are pleased to launch the HR Chronicle Mobile App into final production release.  You can do the following withe the HR Chronicle Mobile App
 
  • View Employee Profile
  • Download Payslips
  • Apply for Leaves
  • Approve Leaves
  • Apply for Expenses
  • View Leave Balances
  • View Leave Calendar
  • HR Department Can Push Notifications for Holidays or special events directly to Smartphones
Stay tuned for more

Monday 29 February 2016

Can your HR & Payroll Solution work on 3rd Party Cloud Services ?

It is very interesting to note, organizations are adopting a whole new way of developing, managing, installing and delivering applications.  Some have a completely cloud enabled approach where 100% applications are on the cloud i.e. the application itself and the database.  Some have a hybrid approach and put only certain applications on the cloud, or even only the database on the cloud the front end application servers on internal infrastructure.



But there is one more strategy which is becoming common place in the way cloud applications are expected to deliver, that is what we call is a semi-cloud approach or hybrid-cloud approach, so what is exactly the semi-cloud approach or hybrid-cloud approach?

Well what happens is the front end of the application, i.e. the user interface, i.e. Website or the Desktop application is on the premises of the customer, but the database which holds the data is on the cloud services, like Azure from Microsoft, AWS from Amazon and the likes, so why people go with this approach ?

This is because there is no need for a dedicated frontend server, the client can utilize an existing front end infrastructure already available, but is able to add mission critical features of mirroring, automated data backup, hot online spare of database, which can be bought from providers of services like Azure, AWS.

Our HR and Payroll solutions supports all 3rd party providers like Azure, AWS and more…

HR Chronicle is the hr and payroll solution, which works in a hybrid environment, i.e. you can have the front end sitting on a client machine and the database on the cloud or even vice versa, its so flexible when it comes to deployment the only limitation you would have is the user of resources which is enforced by the cloud service provider you select, which means, the disk space, number of users, data bandwidth, etc.

Tuesday 2 February 2016

Does your HR and Payroll system have proper audit compliance ?

You will find many HR & Payroll Solutions and various other applications, most of then claim to have great user experience, but have you ever thought, are these systems built on a sound compliance architecture, at least a bare minimum standard of compliance, where you can have an audit trail of all the actions you do within the solution, if not its time you start thinking about it.

Lets understand the importance of having a proper audit trail 

When you add sensitive information into your HR and Payroll solution, is the information of the user entering the record logged, do you have a history of the transaction as how many times times a specific transaction was modified, by which user using which PC, what was the IP address of the PC.  Well if you have not yet thought about this, its time to start thinking.


What happens if salary compensation entry was wrongly entered and payroll processed, another instance would be wrong bank account information recorded and the employee gets less pay, or may be not paid at all, have you ever wondered how would you find out, who would be accountable, for the loss of reputation and emotional stress the employee suffers.

Yes, you guessed it right,  the audit trail will come in handy, an audit trail is a collection of historical records, which will be held in the system forever, meaning if you changed the bank account information of an employee 10 times you would see 10 data sets with information on which user changed it, date and time stamp, the current active data set on the system, in this way you are sure, no one has unauthorized access if they do, it will be reflected on the audit trial. It is also handy to investigate the details, why a particular record was entered wrong, was the information provided incorrectly in the first place or any other reason behind it.

HR Chronicle has a very robust audit engine

Well in HR Chronicle even if you breathe in the software it is recorded, i.e. any activity, from the time you login and the time you log off is recorded in the application audit engine, you can even rollback changed from the audit engine, as we call is “Event Manager”, in the event manager you can see complete audit trail of each and every transaction based on employee name, action type (i.e. bank account modification or salary information modification) with the option to even roll back to a point in time, like a time machine, of sorts, so you need not enter data manually again, if you find an error. With an extremely powerful audit engine and compliance reports, you are assured HR Chronicle will not only surpass audit requirements but exceed them, we also SAS / SOCS compliant reporting out of the box.

Wednesday 27 January 2016

Importance of an effective and easy to use Employee Evaluation System

In todays complex world of human resource and payroll management systems, very often managers overlook the importance of evaluating the employees’ performance.  It is important to make time for this critical process of evaluation employees on their goals, expectations, achievements of those goals and at the same time understand the level of employee performance, over a period of time, so his/her services can be utilized in the maximum productive way possible.


  • Keep it simple for the purpose of objectivity
It is important to keep the whole evaluation process simple, yet objective and quantifiable, having a lengthy bureaucratic process of endless forms will over ride the idea and only increase paperwork getting no ROI in your world of hr and payroll.
  • The process
There are many processes which are used for evaluating employees from single forms to multiple pages, we will just look at a simple case of workflow based process of evaluating employees
  • Define Performance Area
It is important to define the major areas an employee is expected to be reviewed on, e.g. a sales person may be reviewed by the way he writes proposals or the number of client meetings held in a month or a quarter.
  • Define clear single sentence objectives
Once it is clear what your employee has to focus on, you can then, be precise of what the company or manager is expecting from that employee, e.g. closing one single deal for 6 proposals sent to customers
  • Agree on objectives
Once the definition is setup, it is important to get the employee to review the objectives against each performance area, make sure the expectation is understood by the employee, to avoid any misunderstandings.
  • Self Evaluation
Give a chance to the employee to self evaluate his performance, this will create a kind of self responsibility, also will give an idea of how the employee thinks of his performance compare his/her own performance over a period of time.
  • Workflow based approach
Have a proper workflow defined  where employee will have full visibility of what managers think of them, so they can embark on a path of self improvement, thereby enhancing their productivity, in turn giving more output being the same person.

Having said that, HR Chronicle is most flexible and suitable to adapt to your HR and Payroll processes, you can design your evaluation process the way you like.  Whether you want to do a single form based evaluation or a multiple form based or workflow based evaluation mechanism, we can do it all.