World over companies both small and large across all industries are adopting SaaS for deploying new applications and replacing legacy ones. However, organizations need to understand that they just don’t need to join the bandwagon, before taking the giant leap forward organizations need to take a step back and introspect. The need is to understand how HR SaaS solutions play an important role in the organisation’s future business growth and thus a need arises to understand how to they can make the most of it.
Here are few steps that can help you ensure a successful HR SaaS Implementation:
Educate yourself
Get familiar with terms such as
- Multi-tenant SaaS HR solution Vs On-Premise Solutions
- Customization Vs configuration
This is a real twister, as a buyer you would probably be more attracted towards a vendor who offers to customize their solution for your specific requirements but this is another pointer to a probable fake. A true SaaS vendor will run one solution and not versions for different customers. This is done by either focusing on a customer segment that largely needs the same features or alternatively by engineering a high degree of configurability so that each customer can “configure” the solution as they need. When they come across a new requirement, they will typically offer it as a feature enhancement and not as a paid customization.
Every coin has two sides. So does SaaS!
Before going the cloud way, the organization needs to study the benefits and trade-offs of HR SaaS solution in depth, map it against the legacy system. The pros and cons of both options should be carefully weighed, and the risks identified, as applicable to the specific business’s needs. The cost and flexibility benefits should be evaluated considering the licensing fees, internal labour costs, user training costs, storage capacity and support costs.
Case Out a Business Case
Know Your Pain Points
Before moving your HR system to the cloud, understand what processes or applications are causing headaches.
- What keeps you and your HR team up at night?
- What processes are bogged down with cumbersome, manual, paper-based requests?
- What technology is proving to be inefficient or is unable to meet the needs of users?
By understanding the problems HR administrators, managers and other employees involved in HR-led business processes face, you can begin to build a roadmap to overcome these challenges and move toward the HR vision you have for a top-notch organization.Build a list of the problems and rank them by priority. That will help identify critical problems that have to be fixed first and problems that could be addressed later.
Roadmap is the way to go!
Once you know your HR vision and understand your challenges, build a roadmap for achieving your vision. Typically, a roadmap can be for any period from two to five years or beyond. Building a roadmap by process area or technology area over a period of time helps determine the plan of action to resolve the challenges you face. For example, if your major challenges revolves around recruiting and onboarding employees, then these are obvious areas to focus on first. A roadmap should line up which processes you will tackle and in which order you will focus on each of them.
Build the team that wins!
Identify the core stakeholders that would be involved in the project. They should be involved from the envisioning bit itself. The team should have stakeholders from HR, IT and the representatives from End User Community.
How scalable is your vision?
Integration can play an important role in building out the roadmap. Understanding how the pieces fit together helps in understanding where value can be added. Having a recruiting system that doesn’t integrate with your onboarding or core HR software can be a major challenge. On the other end of the scale, the task of having to build a few complex integrations that will last only for a short period of time might influence the order of migrating processes or applications to the cloud. Thus, have a clarity in hand while building the roadmap, of what processes will be part of automation. So, that it is easier for you to choose a vendor that have them all.
Change is a process not an event
Change management is a large part of any enterprise software implementation, and making changes to processes and HR technology requires a solid change management plan to back it up. Developing your change management strategy before you commence on your initiative and then realigning it with your initiative on an ongoing basis will greatly improve acceptance of your new processes and systems. Decide upon the communication strategy and the change agents well in advance to set off any upcoming brunt’s.
Data! Data! Data! We can’t make bricks without clay.
The data is the key to a successful HR SaaS implementation. Keeping your data ready makes it easier for you to have clarity on the process before the questions are put by the vendor. This step ensures both speedy Human Capital Management solutions implementation and data quality in the implementation.These steps are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, remember only when these pieces are joined together correctly only then can one see the full picture. The process can be time consuming and tiring but result makes the pain worthy for the business and employee future growth. Thus, take a plunge in the beautiful world of SaaS for Human Resource Management because it’s worth it!!