Automation of personnel management is a question that sooner or later arises before any head of the enterprise. This question can be initiated by: hr managers, accountants, middle managers, senior management. How to make the right choice and make a decision on the implementation of a particular system, who is the interested party, what opportunities will appear to the management and users of the system after implementation?
To begin with, you need to determine what kind of people management is present and necessary in your enterprise, that is, to answer the question: what part of the added value of the final product is created directly at the expense of employees. The answer to this question will determine what set of functions for managing people you need.
It should be noted that investing in a system that offers automation of an inappropriate level of people management may be ineffective as a result. Since when investing money in a more complex than required, the system freezes funds, and with an insufficient level of automation with the development of the business, the question of replacing the system will soon arise – that is, double-spending.
When making a decision, it is also important to have strategic plans for the development of the enterprise. Because when planning for the expansion and complexity of the business, it is important to understand what scaling from an automated people management system will be needed in the future.
What are the various automation systems in the field we are interested in? Simply put, it is a combination of a set of some references1 and the logic of the relationship between these references.
The presence of such a system is an opportunity to keep in one place a large amount of information related to personnel, to fix the relationship between different types of this information, to analyze certain trends and conditions. Of course, at any level of automation, this is a good help for the HR manager and other support units, as it allows you to significantly reduce the number of “manual” operations, which again save the company money, expressed in the total cost of employee working hours associated with this work.
Why? First of all, to support management decision-making. In the table below, you can see that the more the business is “tied” to people, the higher the demand for such a system. Since information about the state of the company’s personnel, qualitative and quantitative assessment of the staff, the possibility of financial evaluation of non-financial assets (people) become in demand only when a significant part of the company’s capital is placed in the minds of people.
The history of the development of automated personnel management systems began with the creation of large computers in the 60s of the XX century. The main tasks at that time were payroll calculation and personnel accounting. Today in the West there are hundreds of different systems for automating personnel management and personnel management. However, the automation of human resource management cannot be considered as a task separate from the automation of resource management of the enterprise as a whole. Therefore, the upper level – HRMS (human resource management system) – is possible only in the case of complex automation using such large ERP2 systems as R/3, Axapta, Oracle Application.
It is possible to talk about the advantages of a particular system only in relation to the specific tasks and capabilities of the enterprise. A common drawback of domestic systems for our company is the discrepancy between the level of functionality and capabilities of the system required for us. Some domestic and Russian systems are approaching the functionality of personnel management, but basically what can be found in the Ukrainian market corresponds to the level of personnel management. Obviously, with the development of business and increased competition, companies will look for opportunities to improve the efficiency of business management, and the number of implementations and the level of various systems will grow steadily. Accordingly, IT companies – providers of such systems – will increase their offer to the market.
How to choose the right system? To make the correct decision, the system should be selected by a working group consisting of representatives of at least two services: personnel management and information technology. It will not be superfluous to attract a financier to help in calculating the most profitable solutions. In this case, it is necessary to pay attention to the provider’s support for compliance with the requirements of the law in terms of personnel records management;
If possible, it is necessary to get acquainted with representatives of any enterprise in which the system in question is implemented and ask to share their impressions of its work as a representative of the IT service and the personnel service.
In general, the process of implementation and operation of automated personnel management systems, as a rule, resembles the process of learning to swim. The first reaction of all participants is fear and rejection, but after training and developing a skill, life without water seems simply impossible.
1 Directory is a list of any accounting objects (job titles, functional duties, competencies, employees, etc.) with a number of standard or customizable (parameterizable) properties.
2 ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a system for planning and managing enterprise resources necessary for sales, procurement, and accounting for the execution of customer orders in the areas of production, distribution, and service delivery.