Many multinational companies these days are rolling out global HCM solutions (e.g. from Workday, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) with the goal of bringing all their employee data together in one global system and have access to global HR and payroll reporting. However, such global HCM implementations are not for everyone, surely not for SMBs: They require significant investment (in one-time implementation and ongoing license/maintenance fees – often hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars) and they typically take many months to implement.
For many smaller or mid-sized businesses (SMBs), the investment into a global HCM solution is simply not viable. Yet, just like larger multinational companies, SMBs have a need to have consolidated access to their employee data in one system in order to run their business more effectively. Without a consolidated global HCM platform, it becomes extremely cumbersome to generate even the most basic insights about your employee base: What is the staff turnover across different countries? How does the fully loaded cost in country X vs. country Y compare to each other? How does overtime vary by department? How much variable pay do your top performers take home versus the low performers? What percentage of our employee base is older than 50 years and how does this percentage vary across different parts of the organization? What is the average compensation delta between male and female employees?
While in the past the HR function was often viewed as a somewhat “fuzzy” function compared to numbers-driven functions like Sales, Finance and Production/Operations, over the past 5-10 years a new mindset has taken hold. Many organizations place increasing importance on HR/People analytics – i.e. really understanding and interpreting the employee data – and both HR and Finance departments are keen to gather better insights over their employees and the associated labor costs.
The good news is that nowadays you do not need to invest in a big global HCM solution to consolidate all your employee data in one central platform and to derive valuable insights from the data. With an open global HR & Payroll aggregation platform like Payzaar, you can bring all your HR & Payroll together in one central platform without having to change your local systems. You can continue to use your local systems to maintain your data locally – i.e. local HRIS / Payroll, Benefits / Time & Attendance / Commission / Expense tools or simply locally maintained spreadsheets – and the aggregation platform will extract the data from the local systems to give you consolidated HR and payroll reports and analytics across your global employee base. In fact, even if you have invested in a global HCM solution you will likely need an aggregation platform, namely to consolidate all the data elements that are not directly maintained in the global HRIS because they are too locally specific. Typically, this includes data coming from local Payroll systems, local Benefits systems and local or regional Time & Attendance systems.
The benefits of a global aggregation platform like Payzaar are multi-fold:
- No change in local systems required – your local teams can continue to work with the best-in-country local tools that they have invested in and that cater to their specific local needs
- Quick and easy to implement – implementation takes only a few days or weeks depending on the number of countries and data sources
- Lower cost – the cost for an aggregation platform is a fraction of a global HCM solution
- More flexible – you can swap out local systems at your own pace and still benefit from the consolidated access to your global employee data
- Self-service access – provide self-service access to your HR and Finance teams so they can run their specific custom reports and queries, and they can refine their analysis until they have created the exact data views they want of HR and payroll reporting
Author – Marc-Oliver Fiedler – Payzaar
