Analysis and forecasting

HR applications often contain a variety of employee data, including salaries, experience, education, performance reviews and benefits selections. Analysis tools can enable HR managers to leverage that data for strategic decision-making. They can, for instance, track employee performance against company benchmarks, forecast the skills that will be needed for future projects, analyze salary increases by geographic region or professional field, or predict trends in benefits selection and costs.

For example, OHSU's Tonn hopes to eventually use analysis tools to better evaluate recruiting practices. Honing the school's recruiting campaigns could produce better candidates as well as lower costs.

"We can see how many applications a particular source gives us, and whether we ever hire applicants from that source. If we do hire them, do they become successful employees? Running an ad in The Oregonian might produce a thousand applications. But if we didn't hire any of them, then that was a whole lot of administrative work that didn't bear any fruit."

Integrating HCM

Individually, the various HCM tools are helpful, but to get optimal value, they need to be integrated, with the data stored in a common repository, Manning says. But that isn't easy, because most HCM products started as stand-alone applications. Lately, however, a flurry of acquisitions by larger HCM and ERP vendors, such as Oracle, Kenexa and SAP, has resulted in more integrated HCM suites.

That's good news for users, but sometimes integration can't be achieved just by buying a suite. Organizational issues may be in the way, such as if the various HCM functions are split between different corporate departments. Or if the HCM suite has to be implemented across multiple business units running disparate ERP and HR applications.

At Novartis, for example, Talanca's e-learning department is separate from HR. Talanca would like to see the HR department adopt Saba's performance management software so that more HR data would be available for analysis, but it's out of his control. "There's no reason why someone's learning plan and transcript shouldn't be part of their performance record, in one system," he says.

Tyco has a different integration challenge. The data on its 250,000 employees in 72 countries is divided among 25 different HR applications and hundreds of payroll systems. Integrating all these systems with the Kenexa CareerTracker would have been too difficult, so Tyco and Kenexa created an employee self-registration version of the software, which allows workers to enter their own data into the system.

That information has been helpful to Tyco managers in staffing 300 new positions. "We can see what talent we have and move them across the business units," says Zitting. "[The software] is invaluable in this context."

Organizations such as Tyco are increasingly viewing employees as assets, to be acquired, cultivated and deployed strategically -- not unlike product inventory or IT systems. The very name of the software category, human capital management, conveys the notion that a worker is an investment that should be optimized.

"Managers want to see how the people they hired are doing," says Manning. "It's taking the organization's people assets and leveraging them to reach business goals, such as increased sales, profitability and customer satisfaction."