Middle East has been observed to have heavily inadequate human resource availability owing to its floating population and the constant technological revolution, necessitating a need for comprehensive capital management solutions. Seminal research conducted over the course of a decade has found that the top 10 percent of companies with “high-performance work systems” had four times the amount of sales per employee.
“The need of the hour is seamless technologies that help organizations to attract and retain top-notch talent.”
In the present day world of increasingly globalized spaces, profound technological evolution, prolific social and mobile mutation, and the consequent dearth of adequate skill and labor resources, human capital challenges impinge on the bottom lines and profitability of businesses with alarming regularity. Organizations are faced with mounting pressures and complexity of human resource disruptions. And thus, the capability to provide business critical information to human resource leaders enabling optimization of the workforce has become the hallmark of any good HCM solution. HCM is basically a suite of software, databases, and cloud computing, which combined together provide a comprehensive solution for managing all aspects of a workforce. And a good one enables Agile, Strategic HR.
A sound Human Resource solution can serve as a potent tool to induct enhanced efficiency into HR decision-making, talent management, workforce agility and the resultant surge in the rate of return on human capital investment.
A comprehensive HCM system is a grid of interlocking pieces that handle hiring, tracking, management, payroll and all the rest of the myriad applications of a workforce, while serving the overarching objective of a comprehensive management of each employee’s lifecycle from application to retirement,overseeing and guiding his/her complete journey through the organization.
The broad goal of any HCM system is to Recruit, Align, Manage, Develop, Compensate and Grow Talent within the organization. Whether an Enterprise edition HCM system or one for small and medium sized businesses, an efficient HCM solution gives a business owner control over each aspect of personnel and talent management. These would typically include tracking contact information of both employees, applicants and potential hires, work progress reviews, pay histories, including bonuses and overtime, identifying workforce needs and potential new positions required, hours worked for each employee, benefit tracking as well as career development goals.
An HCM solution should help you to automate your HR processes, enabling you to track, manage, and analyze all your employee data, from application to retirement. It should enable improved efficiency through paperless workflows, with robust recruitment management, benefits and absence tracking tools, as well as gives you greater control over staffing, time off, and benefits administration.
Another imperative feature of an effective HCM solution is powerful analytics functionality, whether HR reporting or performance management, which helps organizations to align employee performance with corporate goals and also analyze applicant or employee data for better workforce management.
A complete HCM suite should include Employee Lifecycle Management with individual, developed & scalable modules for a Learn Platform, Onboarding, Performance Management, Compensation, Recruiting, Development Planning and even succession Planning.
Middle East has been observed to have heavily inadequate human resource availability owing to its floating population and the constant technological revolution, necessitating a need for comprehensive capital management solutions. Faced with acute shortage of talented, skilled and qualified professionals, organizations in the Middle East have increasingly started realizing that failure to implement appropriate talent management systems will result in a definite deficit in employee retention and engagement. Spurred by this, more and more large enterprises are opting for the Business editions of HCM – fully formed and comprehensive HR solutions. Even among the SMB’s, uptake has been good, though the solutions need to be customized for their specific needs, which might not require the full-suite capabilities that enterprises would.
Seminal research conducted over the course of a decade has found that the top 10 percent of companies with “high-performance work systems” had four times the amount of sales per employee.This has led to organizations realizing that HR cannot be completely responsible for the maintenance and accuracy of a core HR information system, and that the insights generated from an effective HCM system can help guide business decisions and impact profitability. For optimizing and maximizing company talent, Middle East organizations are now relying on comprehensive HCM solutions that provide timely, accurate and reliable fundamental data such as personal, job and compensation information associated with each employee record.
While the popularity and functional benefit remains higher for Middle East enterprises, managing a large employee base and multiple HR systems across various locations, the many innovative cloud HCM solutions, packaged as individual, user-friendly, aesthetic modules have facilitated adoption.
But the path to technology-enabled Human Capital Management is still laden with a lot of challenges and obstacles. To start with, integrations are becoming more complex. This is one of the most common and upfront challenges with adopting an HCM system, or for that matter, any new technology nowadays. For creating connectivity between HR applications and an ERP system, a higher degree of customization is being required. As recruitment becomes global, and as applications and applicants are tracked, there is a growing need to synchronize and seamlessly integrate all this information across databases and ERP systems for operational efficiency. While smaller businesses can manage a point-to-point integration and custom connectivity, for larger organizations, or as businesses grow further, this complexity leads to increased cost, effort, time and resources to manage this integration across the architecture.
Secondly, cloud-based mobile and SaaS applications are driving the need for a Hybrid solution, with integration platforms that can bridge such HCM apps to on-premises systems.
Thirdly, on-premise HCM solutions have limitations. Widely distributed workforce networks, that work across multiple time-zones, cannot work with on-premise HCM solutions, as these are not inclusive of offshore teams.
Organizations are also struggling with Data gaps, created when data is captured from a range of disparate sources and data points, and is not readable in a unified format to enable analysis.
But the most critical challenge organizations are facing is a lack of vision, with respect to how to optimally utilize HCM systems and data analytics to derive the maximum business value. A lack of alignment with what they hope to achieve with the data leads to ineffective capture of data, impacting its quality, and an inability to translate such data into meaningful insights, whether to proactively manage underlying threats, or harness innate strengths.
Vendors, VAR’s and the Channel are aware of these challenges that enterprises face, and are endeavoring to address these. Consulting and education will pay the most critical role, to enable businesses to understand where they are and where they hope to get to by deploying an HCM system is crucial to its successful implementation. Businesses can feel empowered if they can understand the full scope and capabilities of the data analytics that a comprehensive HCM system equips them with. Specific training on data capture, unification of data into readable formats that facilitate analysis, and extraction of insights for real business value can help businesses overcome this challenge. In terms of operational scale and scope, cloud is offering the answer for non-premise HCM solutions.
As enterprises get more digitized, managing talent and aligning the human capital expenditure with core business objectives is becoming imperative. The need of the hour is seamless technologies that help organizations to attract and retain top-notch talent. Solutions should be geared to provide enterprises with Services like Roadmap planning, which includes understanding the application architecture & analysis of migration options, Product Assessment, as well as Implementation and Maintenance Services. With the ready availability of improved HCM solutions that are mobile optimized and equipped with open talent acquisition suites& data analytics modules, enterprises can reap the benefits of rich insights on HR to guide business leaders, and enhance the human resource lifecycle for both candidates and recruiters.
