Return on Investment (ROI)
BOS Solutions requires a more robust HR solution to support its human resource activities. The company must be more careful in its IT investment to derive maximum value from it. That is, vendors must deliver HR solution that will offer expected outcomes on the business.
The aim of the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System is to streamline the HR processes so that executives can focus on employees’ development and productivity rather manually tracking, filing and shuffling their documents. BOS Solutions must realise tangible results from the IT investments from the start.
That is, it should not take over a year before the company realises any returns on the investment. Given that employees are critical part of the company’s assets for creating competitive advantage, the HR solution will be evaluated for its effectiveness on several areas.
The Applicant Tracking System will have to demonstrate returns more than financial benefits. In the past, companies would purchase and install ERP systems to enhance employee satisfaction. The ERP system would improve competitiveness by enabling the company to be able to gather, consolidate and generate accurate data about employees in a timely fashion.
The new Applicant Tracking System would be able to shorten process cycles, enhance the accuracy of collected data, facilitate application processes, reduce costs of operations and eliminate further costs incurred through the current redundant Ceridian Recruiting system.
The new Applicant Tracking System will facilitate employee self-service. The HR solution will offer several options to demonstrate ROI. It will eliminate manual search for missing data of employment history, certifications, or attached documents. As a result, it would save on administrative time.
In addition, employee records shall be easier to handle. In most cases, HR executives face challenges related to handling sheer volumes of employees’ records. Still, manual processes require greater attention to details when collecting information, typing them into a single system and ensuring that employee information reaches the intended audience e.g., HR/Payroll team.
The new Applicant Tracking System will ensure that HR executives focus on their primary tasks and guide recruitment processes, develop key talents, review workforce and applicants paradigms.
The benefits of a new Applicant Tracking System for BOS Solutions would be far reaching. Having job, education and certification history on the employees would allow for a broader picture in promotions, training and development. The program upgrade would also allow for more detailed reporting of applicants by job, department and division.
BOS Solutions should be able to capture specific data because of implementing the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System to demonstrate impacts and return on investment. Data on HR productivity, user satisfaction, cycle time to locate employee information and applicants’ engagement with the system will demonstrate outcomes.
RIO must reflect monetary values against the cost of the project. For instance, in the cases of HR solution for recruitment, the ROI would be determined based on the some assumptions. This situation may lead to manual recruitment processes.
The HR recruitment team wastes time and resources because the current Ceridian Recruiting tool is not integrated, not customizable and does not allow the employer to upload documents such as employment history, certifications, or attached documents.
Initiate new hiring or change of employment terms
HR team would enter data once and save 120 working hours in a year due to enhanced efficiency
The average hourly rate for senior HR team is $100
Savings realised: 120*100 = $12,000
Therefore, BOS Solutions would save $12,000 per annum by implementing the new HR solution.
Assumptions
There are basic assumptions adopted to ensure that the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System deliver the intended outcomes. Employees would be able to adopt the new systems, demonstrate satisfaction, and capture the intended data.
In addition, the HR executives will show changes in knowledge, attitudes and skills after adopting the new HR solutions. Still, it is expected that implementation processes would not face challenges, behaviour changes will facilitate adoption and performance of the HR team.
Moreover, senior executives will support the implementation of the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System while the CFO will approve the budget. To facilitate adoption of the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System, they should be compatible with the existing Ceridian Recruiting and seamlessly integrate.
The new Applicant Tracking System is expected to optimise HR processes. This would ensure that BOS Solutions meets its business objective of developing an integrated employee database with all HR/Payroll Latitude programs such as name, date of hire, division or department and rate of pay.
The database will also contain employment history, certifications, or attached documents, as well as all applicant data, applicant flow logs, EEO and Vets 100 information and basic recruiting statistics. With abundant data, the HR team will have reliable information to facilitate recruitment processes and succession planning.
The data would allow the HR planner to understand applicants’ characteristics and employee turnover trends to facilitate forecasting of employee turnover and salary increment if required. The HR department would be able to develop a forward-looking approach to all HR challenges, employee compensation structure and areas of weaknesses among others.
BOS Solutions aims to develop an efficient, cost-effective, customisable and scalable recruiting process through the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System. Hence, HR recruiting experts will use the HR tools to develop a reliable recruitment plan. The department will develop specific metrics for new recruits.
The HR executives will rely on applicants’ data to evaluate in order to identify the best candidates for specific positions, determine costs of hiring and sources of qualified or best applicants. These data would support hiring, payment and even promotion decisions. It would balance recruitment and align roles, pay rates and qualifications.
By having all employment history, certifications, or attached documents, applicants’ data, applicant flow logs, EEO and Vets 100 information and basic recruiting statistics and rate of pay, the recruiting team would be able to successful applicants’ profiles, match applicants with appropriate positions and then perform competitive analyses to determine suitable pay rates.
It is assumed that the HR department would use employee data to develop employee capabilities and enhance engagement. In this process, HR executives would assess skills, experience levels, strengths and weaknesses of employees.
By relying on the company’s skill map, the HR executives would be able to evaluate the effectiveness of training and development programmes and develop appropriate plans while taking into account recruits’ potentials to comprehend expected roles and career growth prospects.
Further, the HR department may identify the best developmental activities as observed among top performs and use such information to develop the best training and development materials for the entire organisation. In addition, such information may also be utilised to select the best recruits and develop training and development programmes for them.
To derive maximum ROI from the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System, BOS Solutions HR executives would develop a competitive compensation plans or pay rates that aim to facilitate employees’ performance and drive results. The HR executives will review of all pay rates and other benefits to determine a group that drive performance based on their compensation structures.
This would determine the relationship between employee pay rates and performances, retention, attraction of new applicants and new recruits. The results may be used to determine the best pay rates and predict possible compensation for future performances. BOS Solutions executives will be able to compare its pay rates against the market benchmarks and then review these rates to determine their impacts on the budget and savings on costs of employee compensation.
As a result, HR executives may review the pay structure and adjust rates to competitive, sustainable levels based on performances. It is expected that BOS Solutions will rely on the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System to gather all relevant applicants’ data.
The HR executives will observe key demographic trends, applicants’ pools, current employees and then develop hiring strategies based on these observations. It would be effective for BOS Solutions to develop appropriate tools that would facilitate employee selection and recruitment.
The new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System should ensure customisation such as importing job, education and certification history. The program should also have detailed reporting of applicants in job, department, division, and geographic location and support the standard EEO and Vets 100 reporting and custom report building.
These may be generated automatically so that HR managers can respond to areas that require additional workforce, training or any other appropriate actions.
Risks
Like any other new solutions in organisations, the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System are likely to encounter risks at various levels. These risks are categorised as high risks, moderate risks and low risks, but there are also critical success factors for the company to consider (Umble, Haft, & Umble, 2003).
A change in staffing is high risk to effective implementation of the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System. BOS Solutions may not be able to stop its qualified staff from leaving the company. When such skilled, knowledgeable and experienced employees leave an organisation, IT system implementation experiences drawbacks.
In addition, drastic changes in technologies may render the new ERP and the new Applicant Tracking System obsolete particularly if they are implemented slowly. To overcome these risks, BOS Solutions must dedicate adequate resources for acquisition and implementation of the IT solutions. In addition, it must ensure that senior executives support the new solutions and implementation processes.
Moderate risks may emanate within the organisation. BOS Solutions employees may not possess the right skill levels, increased costs, recruitment and training of new staff to support system implementation may be difficult. BOS Solutions will have to consider its staff skill levels, depend on project implementation schedules, control costs and hire experienced IT implementation to support
Employees could also present low risks to implementation of the new IT systems. For instance, they may ignore training or training materials may not adequately address requirements. In this case, training must be mandatory for all employees and training materials must meet the expected standards to allow employees acquire the necessary skills (Worley & Chatha, 2005).
References
Park, K., & Kusiak, A. (2005). Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) operations support system for maintaining process integration. International Journal of Production Research, 43(19), 3959–3982.
Phillips, J. (2007). Measuring ROI in Human Resources: Calculating the Impact of ROI on HR Programs. Web.
Umble, J., Haft, R., & Umble, M. (2003). Enterprise Resource Planning: Implementation Procedures and Critical Success Factors. European Journal of Operations Research, 146, 241-257.
Worley, J., & Chatha, K. (2005). Implementation and optimisation of ERP systems: a better integration of processes, roles, knowledge and user competencies. Computers in Industry, 56(6), 620–638.