Business case for HRIS

Business Case for HRIS

Key strategic areas in Insurance sector are employee retention, compensation and reward policy. Retention can be linked directly to talent management and training & development. Value added benefit derived from the HRIS can surely revitalise the organisation. The recent recession has furthered the need of lean highly efficient organisations to stem the tide against the recession. The HRIS offers benefits to employees, business as well as the HR department.

Benefit for the employees.

The HRIS allows immediate access to the employees with whole lot of HR information ie Personal particulars, Disciplinary procedure information, availability of all relevant forms, compensation information, benefit information, leave coordination, managing Tax information and instructions about training and policies. Hence the employee has no longer the need to either go to the HR department or speak to them over the phone. Further more it gives transparency to the functioning of the HR department, which has been the sore point in the employee-HR department relationship.

Benefit for the Business.

The HRIS impact on the business is far reaching. It not only reduces the administrative costs by reducing the administrative layers but paves a way for ‘Re-engineering’. HRIS also brings about enhancement in executive decision making, employee training, better interdepartmental integration and better reporting structure. Thus HRIS helps toward reaching the organisational vision by integration, personnel development, knowledge management and HR analysis. (Mayfield and Lunce, 2003) Further more difficult decisions such as freezing salaries, eliminating overtime, reducing workforce and reducing benefit contributions and redundancy can be handled easily and in a correct manner by HRIS. It provides them with all the information required and also gives them the advantage of structuring the employer data as per their requirement. HRIS also helps managers to evaluate Key parameter Indicators, which are difficult to measure activities, by generation of data in graphs and charts.. Similarly recruitment system help in maintaining talent pool, which helps the organisation reduce costs by removing the recruitment agencies.

Benefits for the HR department

The major part of any HR professional daily responsibilities is spent at administrative and advisory role than on the core functionality. Hence HRIS generates time availability to be devoted to the strategic decision making. Furthermore, it aids the department by increasing data accuracy, higher processing speed, better productivity and ability to produce more needful and sophisticated results. (Ceriello and Freeman 1998)

Issues in Implementation of HRIS

Pre-implementation stage: The basic issue is identification of various HR functions for inclusion in the system. A detailed work flow analysis is required on the cost effectiveness of all available systems and based upon it a thorough customisation suite should be identified which should be in lines with the organisations’ HR process.(Walker,1993) For this a evaluation team consisting of members from HR, IT , Finance and purchasing department should be formed.(Wisner and Wisner, 1994).

Implementation stage: After the selection of the HRIS, next priority should be identification of infrastructure requirements, Inter- department adroitness for incorporation of the system with the organisational needs, formulation of terms and policies for the implementation and identification of the training requirements and testing of the system. A proper project management practises are required to ease out the issues. Training along with the awareness of the benefits of the system should be used as a means for breaking the ‘inertia’ of existing employee. (Elliot,1999). This stage is for consolidation and all attempts should be aimed at proving and testing the system, prior to it going live.

Post implementation. The major feature of this stage is measuring the performance of the system and reorganising the responsibilities of the HR department. Issue in this stage can arise out of adaptive as well as corrective maintenance requirements which can be due to the misinterpretation of directives or due to system limitation. (Ceriello and Freeman, 1998). Issues can also arise out of need for redefining responsibilities of HR managers. (Hagood and Friedman, 2002). Thus in order to reduce the issues in this stage pre-emptive actions need to be taken right at the beginning about defining HR processes and methodical training during the consolidation phase.

Successful Implementation. As HRIS brings about critical changes, hence there would be areas which would resist the change (The Interia). Thus the key factor in the success of HRIS implementation is a firm commitment from the Top management,-the sponsors of the project, for providing adequate funding as well as catering to staffing needs of the project. The top brass should assist in formation of a proper steering committee, comprising of all members across the organisation, who can ensure that their line managers have the necessary directives and responsibilities for making the HRIS operational. This committee should resolve major issues and take timely course corrective actions. The steering committee needs to ensure that managers are conversant with the likely changes and garner their support towards this change. This will help set an example and parameter for each member’s department and will also prepare the ground for dealing with change-management issues.

Reference

• http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3495/is_n12_v41/ai_19099649/pg_4/?tag=content;col1
• http://www.esocialsciences.com/data/articles/Document1206200781.437014E-02.pdf
• http://www.wkforce.com/human-resources/hris.html