Are there skills gaps in your business? What is the cost of hiring and onboarding a new employee? How should you forecast for overtime? What will your upcoming expense costs look like? Is there an easier and faster way to predict and prepare employee bonuses and tax implications?
By Bruce van Wyk, CEO of Deel Local Payroll, powered by PaySpace
These questions all have answers, hidden inside data generated by human resource (HR) and payroll systems. Yet, finding those same answers often means hours of human effort, isolated to specific departments and even individuals. At large companies, the information tends to reside inside an enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite, where HR and payroll services are subordinate functions.
ERPs have educated the business world on the power of software and data.
However, the uniform and monolithic character of ERPs also means that many square pegs are forced into round holes.
For instance, the HR modules within an ERP may not possess the precise focus necessary to simplify intricate payroll calculations. Likewise, ERP payroll modules are often slow to adopt changes in workforce legislation, whereas a dedicated cloud-native payroll platform can enact those changes much more quickly – even without payroll administrators requesting the changes.
Yet, the ERP is not at fault. Instead, the reality is that as we embrace data to make better and smarter decisions, payroll and HR software benefit by becoming more specialised. It enables them to answer quickly and accurately questions such as those I posed at the top of this article. ERP modules might do the same, but specialised software does it faster, reaching a wider audience and empowering authorised employees to access the information they need.
Let’s say a manager on the manufacturing floor needs an overview of their workers: they want to see overtime patterns and hours clocked. If the information resides in an ERP, chances are they have to request the information through the payroll or HR departments, then wait. In contrast, modern HR and payroll platforms provide self-service reporting features: the manager can log in and generate what they need without taking the time of HR and payroll staff, who in turn can focus on other high-value tasks.
Specialised cloud-native platforms are making it easy to design and automate the underlying processes, customise fields, quickly implement legislative changes, and provide secure access to authorised users. Expecting an ERP to natively have such agility is like turning a giant oil tanker, whereas cloud-native payroll and HR platforms are nimble and more responsive. Furthermore, as they are cloud-native, they are more capable of rapidly deploying new features such as artificial intelligence and employee self-service portals.
Where does that leave ERPs? The ERP remains the source of truth and continues to serve as the core of the organisation. Through integration, the payroll and HR platforms extract information from the ERP. We’ve created this synergy for our large enterprise clients, so I know it works incredibly well. Rather than try to shoehorn everything into the ERP, we can elevate different business functions to coexist with and benefit from the ERP’s power.
ERPs are powerful, but they don’t need to do everything. The major advantage of the cloud era is that companies can utilise specialised software, putting features such as automated calculations, reporting, self-service, legislation updates, and real-time management in the hands of the people who benefit from it. Organisations that rely on ERPs can get the best out of their data and processes while enjoying the features of specialised platforms, turning functions such as payroll and HR into data-driven value creators.