5 Use Cases for Adding HR to your ERP

If you’re a business owner, you may already have invested in ERP software. Enterprise software is a single system which holds all your business data and information, including financial transactions, customer history and employee information. Having everything inside a single system has multiple benefits, including helping you achieve the all-important, “single version of the truth”.

 It isn’t altogether common for ERP systems to include HR software, but more and more you’ll find that the “big guys” are including some HR functionality in their ERP offering.

 Here are 5 use cases for having HR software in your ERP.

1. Employee Lifecycle Management

 Comprehensive employee records are a must for anyone seeking a single version of the truth. Since your ERP acts as your central data repository for all your other business transactions (financial, sales, products etc) why wouldn’t you use it to record your employee “transactions” too. Think tracking salary bands, rates and increases; changes in position or employee transfers. Any common HR processes like equipment assignation, disciplinaries or grievances can be handled on your ERP too. Your employee record should contain any relevant information you may wish to understand on an individual or a collective level. Each employee record combines on an ERP platform to give you the ability to report upon or slice and dice information across the group.

2. Absence Management

 With staff typically being the biggest cost to a business, it’s essential to understand the cost of absence. Your ERP should be set up to run live KPIs on the cost of absence – sickness, holiday, medical leave etc – and the counts of absence should be measured too, so you can determine base lines of acceptability. If your HR system is extra good it might even measure staff against the Bradford Factor, assigning a score to serial offenders to help you understand and manage the human element of sickness absence. Of course, there’s plenty of other types of absence and different countries have their own legislative requirements around leave; ADV leave in the Netherland; RTT leave in France; Thematic leave in Belgium. A great ERP system will have an advanced leave model which allows you to build in different types of leave for your global workforce.

3. Talent Management

 More than just appraisal software, your talent management tool is also used for understanding your competencies, skills gaps, and succession planning. Recording a member of staff as a flight risk or a high achiever can be useful when making the case for promotion or pay increases. When you are budgeting inside the same software, it all comes together nicely when it comes to planning for promotion and succession.

4. Learning and Development Management

 Training your staff takes an investment in both time and money. Even more so if you work in a heavily regulated industry where workforce compliance is mandatory. Tracking the cost of training and developing your team by linking L&D activity, attendance and time, from within your ERP software, is essential. The only way to track the true cost of staff development is to understand the time it takes to undergo the training event and the capital required to put them through it. Both these together will give you the best visibility of your L&D costs against budget. And for any business with said legislative compliance measures to maintain, keeping everything in a single system is worth its weight in gold. You can ensure you are retaining your compliance whilst measuring the true cost of compliance and ensure you are budgeting enough to fulfil your legislative requirements.

5. Applicant Tracking

 Retaining and attracting new staff is one of the biggest challenges facing business just now. But can you tell exactly how much your attrition is costing you? Or how much it costs to re-recruit for every lost member of staff? The cost of recruitment isn’t just the obvious financial metrics such as advertising costs and recruitment fees. You may also need to understand how many days each vacancy stays open, and in turn, which positions take the longest to recruit for. This could even feed back into your ERP talent module alerting you to those posts you need to exercise caution around.

If you are using NetSuite as your finance system, why not consider adding HR for NetSuite? A SuiteApp, built for NetSuite, with all the above functionality and more, our software plugs the HR gap in your business.

 To find out more, just get in touch

Written by Emma Stewart – Sales and Marketing Director at CloudTamers