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Human capital management powers business

HR departments are often the unsung heroes of the enterprise. Everyone knows how important great hires are to ensuring the success of any company, but to make sure they perform at their best, companies require a great team to recruit, onboard and support those hires.

But as companies invest more in human capital, the ability to recruit, onboard, and maintain employees becomes key to operational success. HCM is very expensive; according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Human Capital Effectiveness report, in 2012 HRM costs rose nearly 20% to $1,923 per employee.1 Those costs are largely centered in talent management, engagement, leadership, retention, and workplace intelligence, but PWC has acknowledged that there is waste in HR spend; they estimate that their HR clients could save as much as 15-25% of their budgets if they eliminated these inefficiencies.2

Technology can create a great deal of inefficiency in any HR budget, largely because of the wide variety of HCM systems that people operations must use to keep track of employees from hire-to-retire. Personnel data has traditionally been kept in on-premises legacy systems, which have stringent security requirements. But as technology changes and new applications and services come to market, this data must be accessible by employees from their own personal devices at any time, which requires more agile data accessibility and security. As it stands, in order for HR team members to manage employee data from hire-to-retire, they have to connect data from numerous systems - recruitment, payroll, performance, existing HR systems, and more. In order to orchestrate all this data and create a single view of the employee, fragile and cumbersome point-to-point integrations between systems must be coded, which often require lengthy and custom processes like manual entry of data. Plus, point-to-point integration tends to be fragile difficult to scale, and prone to breakage, which can put the integration in a difficult position in a competitive hiring environment.

 

HCM integration saves time and money

HCM teams are increasingly turning to cloud-based systems like WorkdayUltimate Software, and ADP to run their HR programs; these market-disrupting technologies are valued for their ability to run traditionally resource-heavy HR systems in a more lightweight and agile fashion. Human capital management systems work best when they can streamline processes and information, serving it up to create a single view of the employee. In order to offer a single user interface in which customers can easily manage and maintain all aspects of the HR process - from talent managing to hiring, from payroll to benefits - human capital management SaaS providers need to develop applications which can integrate between various services. Developers can be hired to create custom point-to-point integration, at a high incremental cost, or companies can leverage a powerful integration layer, which can do a lot of this work for a fraction of the price and in a scalable manner.

PeopleMatter, a top HR provider for the services industry, found that the process of onboarding a new customer could take weeks, as a developer had to create custom integrations for every single customer, resulting in wasted dollars and developer time. PeopleMatter’s experience with integration is an instructive one, as they were concerned the lengthy time to get employees into data systems was adding too much to their operational costs, and risking low customer satisfaction. They needed a way to get these systems talking with each other much faster than having developers build custom integrations every time.

MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform turned out to be a great solution. MuleSoft worked with the PeopleMatter team to build the initial integration application, leveraging the Anypoint Connector for PeopleMatter. This connector integrated the Hire module with the customers’ HR and payroll systems. As new employee information is entered into PeopleMatter Hire, it is transformed and sent through the integration application through a set of data format standards designed to streamline HR data interchange. The platform performs all of the necessary data transformation and mediation for the customer’s target systems, across any API or protocol. And it works in a truly hybrid fashion, across both on-premises and cloud-based applications. It took three weeks to build the initial integration app, and now, additional customers can be onboarded and deployed in just two days - saving massive amounts of time and money. As a result, PeopleMatter has seen higher customer retention rates, which has led to higher renewal rates and increased revenue.

HCM integration provides a solution for some of the cost and operational efficiency problems that HR departments face. Instead of gathering employee data in a slow and manual way, an integration platform can help orchestrate and automate important HCM data processes, providing a single view of the employee.

Learn how systems and applications integration can help streamline HCM processes and HR departments. To find out more about how integration can help you meet your business goals contact us today.

Learn more about MuleSoft’s integration solutions for HR »

 PwC HR Sustainable Cost Reduction, 2009.