In today’s day and age, the technology in the Human Resource department is moving ahead at a rapid pace. To remain agile, data-driven, and adept in attracting new talent the HR specialists need to adapt to the ever-changing requirements of their workforce.
Fortunately, cloud-based solutions offer many benefits that help to ensure that HR department functions more productively and efficiently. From streamlining everyday tasks like payroll processing and benefits administration to recruiting and on-boarding, the cloud can offer HR professionals the effective tools to make sound businesses decisions and grow the right capabilities to meet today’s business needs.
The cloud solutions for the HR industry include Oracle’s HCM Cloud, ADP’s RUN Powered and Ceridian’s Dayforce HCM, who are the most significant HR software-as-a-service players, ranging from payroll and talent acquisition/on-boarding systems to full-fledged human-capital management platforms.
Oracle’s HCM Cloud manages Human Resources records, employee compensation, as well as talent acquisition and review. It includes collaboration and analytics capabilities.
ADP’s RUN Powered offers HR management tools built on a top of online payroll and tax processing service for startups and small businesses, while ADP’s Vantage HCM, designed for larger enterprises, offers employee measurement and analytics, helping Human Resources manage costs and simplify administration.
Ceridian’s Dayforce HCM is a cloud platform that offers payroll processing, benefits enrolment, Human Resources records maintenance, as well as compliance monitoring, all while enabling companies to find and hire talent.
Here is a list of nine tangible benefits of a cloud-based hr platform. Hopefully, this information can help you make progress toward moving these critical functions to the cloud.
1. Reduced Paper Clutter
In the HR department, singular requirements for workflow and security produces a large amount of paperwork that is initiated even before somebody is hired and goes on long after they left. But manual records management doesn’t always stand up to the hardships of the real world. Paperwork is often misclassified or lost as the manual system tends to break down now and then. With all of your important documents and employee information stored at your fingertips in a secure cloud, you can save time and money avoiding unnecessary extra time hunting down any important records.
2. Control of access to data
One of the benefits of eliminating paper clutter is the improvement in access management. Cloud-based solutions allow more flexibility for establishing who has access to sensitive data about company employees. By keeping important HR documents in the cloud and properly configuring permissions, companies can ensure that only authorised users from the corresponding departments have access to the employee data. For organisations with multiple sites, the instant access for the workers’ data from anywhere in the world is an invaluable asset. This also leads to increased employee engagement and higher mobility for the digitally enabled workforce.
3. Increased Productivity
One major feature of cloud-based HR solution is that the system can be accessed from any device, at any time, and from anywhere, increasing productivity and making HR supervisors more responsive handling employee tasks on the go. It allows transforming once manual, time-consuming actions into on-demand processes, where all data can be updated and shared in real time. When the team can collaborate on the same documents, that makes the HR department more productive. In addition, workforce efficiency goes up when employees can view information and complete tasks without HR assistance.
With shared platform, the time spent on low-value work can be reduced allowing to concentrate on driving business growth – gaining new skills, finding new ways to recruit the best talent, evaluating individual performance, and identifying strategic goals.
4. Getting Cost Advantages
Cloud-based human resources software offers significant cost advantages that come from, among others, eliminating hardware. Since there is no software or hardware to install, no deployment is required resulting in zero installation costs. Set up time is reduced significantly because all HR has to do is sign up for the subscription to access to the various modules required.
The transition to the cloud also cuts down burdensome upgrades and on-spot software maintenance, because the cloud provider manages most of these tasks, and offers the users new options and features with each new cloud upgrade.
Finally, it is a pay-as-you-go service, which is supported by a simple subscription-based fee without ongoing operational costs.
5. Unifying processes with less efforts
Moving to a cloud hr management platform leads to unification of processes both internally and across teams. Previously disparate functions, such as applicant tracking, performance management, and compensation can all be connected in one environment. With core apps in the cloud, these items can be incorporated into the programs used by employees in their day-to-day activities. All this leads to smooth integration of variety of business functions such as payroll, timekeeping, benefit management, retirement planning, and more.
6. Reduced downtime
Time-consuming hardware breakdowns or lost paperwork are common issues in many HR departments and reduce the productivity of the entire business while incurring IT support costs. With the cloud, the downtime risk is significantly limited and HR staff can benefit from greater time control and overall efficiency. Instead of wasting time on burdensome manual processes or updating bulky on-premise software, HR can focus on solving real business problems.
7. Improved strategic planning
By working with senior leadership to understand the strategy and analysing the impact of external conditions, HR can identify the capabilities important for supporting business objectives. As human capital and talent management becomes critical, HR strategic planning plays an increasingly significant role in identifying the obstacles to achieving strategic objectives.
Cloud-based platforms offer real-time access to current, sharable, 360-degree view information that assures HR of accuracy and reliability of their forecasts. This, in turn, leads to improved decision-making and strategic planning that is better aligned with the business drivers.
Conclusion
Whether it’s storage, networking, or software-as-a-service (SaaS) functions, cloud systems have come to dominate the computing model in HR technology. Considering all of the opportunities and advantages of cloud computing, many companies begin to prefer on-premise HR systems in favour of cloud-based platforms. As the technology continues to evolve, it starts to cover even more HR tasks, leaving the managers to focus on value-added activities such as new employee training or assisting leadership with people-related strategic planning.
Companies are moving their core HR capabilities, such as payroll, to cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) for greater operational agility and cost-savings. Smaller enterprises are motivated primarily by software innovations, release cycles, and lower ownership costs, as a way to move HR into a more strategic role. Large companies tend to opt for both on-premise and cloud approaches. Most of their core processes—such as payroll—are more likely to remain on-premise, while performance and other functions with wider population of users are moving to the cloud.
