The benefits of a Salesforce HRMS

If you’ve decided it’s time to upgrade your HRMS, there’s a multitude of factors to consider. Cost, implementation, ease-of-use, not to mention ensuring you select a platform that can cater to your specific requirements.

But if you’re one of the 150,000 (and growing) organisations who already use Salesforce, here’s some IT parlance to consider – ‘single platform strategy’. This phrase refers to a cloud computing approach that sees different business applications, like Sales, Finance, Time and Expenses, and HR and Payroll all run on the same technology, in this case Salesforce. So, a Salesforce HRMS sound like good news for IT leaders, but what does it mean for HR?

When you implement a standalone HRMS solution, you pay for its bells and whistles regardless of your actual requirements – which is why many organisations only use a fraction of their HR software capabilities.

By implementing a Salesforce HRMS, system functionality can be introduced in as requirements arise, and on a timescale that suits your own organisational development. No need to worry about paying for features your neither need nor want, if you don’t want to use them, you don’t pay for them.

The xcd platform is the only single HR and Payroll solution on the Salesforce platform, which allows us to provide all of the below benefits to our clients.

The Benefits of a Salesforce HRMS

Implementation

HRMS implementation can never be described as a simple process, and any vendor who’ll tell you it is should be viewed with a healthy dose of scepticism. But for organisations already active on the Salesforce platform in other areas of their business, technical familiarity and existing platform skills can ease the experience and speed the process of time to value.

Similarly, when it comes to adoption, training a workforce on an HRMS solution that’s based on a familiar user interface is a far more straightforward task than introducing a completely new set of tools.

“It was simple to get people to adopt xcd, as most of our people use salesforce every day.” – Clare Riddiford, Salesforce Manager at Homeless Link

Flexibility

Investigating the options out there in the market, you may be shocked at the lack of configurability on offer. This is because standalone HRMS solutions often have a standard model of HR and a set way of managing processes, meaning organisations implementing them must adapt to fit around how they work.

Salesforce enables flexibility as a key USP because of the way the underlying technology is designed – and one of the key reasons our founders decided to build on the platform in the first place. HR on Salesforce can be configured around the specific processes that make up your people operations.

“With xcd, there are customisations that we could select – we knew that we wanted a fairly standard core HR and payroll solution, but we wanted something more bespoke when it came to the performance module and xcd could work that way.” – Henry Horsfall, HR Director at Landmark Space

Integration

With HR running on the same platform as other key business units, these functions operate from a single database.

This means operational people information is immediately available to all stakeholders without any need for HR managers to run reports, find information, update spreadsheets, or print off lists. Performance data, attendance, leave, learning and development, recruitment and onboarding – information bottlenecks – and the failure demand they create – between HR and the departments it serves are eliminated.

Risk

How robust are your current vendor’s continuity protocols? What would happen if an unforeseen technical catastrophe meant you couldn’t pay your people?

This is another key factor in xcd’s choice to build on the Salesforce platform – protected by one of the world’s most comprehensive and sophisticated disaster recovery networks, with backup data centres around the world, Salesforce boasts up-time of 99.99%.

Security is formidable, in line with what you would expect of the world’s most popular business cloud platform, which is a key factor when it comes to making a case to technology leaders, as HR data – a trove of highly personal and confidential information – often represents one of their biggest GDPR security risks.

Learn more: Salesforce is the answer to HR data security.

Reporting and analytics

Salesforce’s reporting functionality was originally designed to enable sales and marketing professionals to track and measure how they engaged customers throughout their sales journey, no matter how long and complex the process.

The parallels between customer journey and the employee lifecycle – the need to track, develop and engage – are profound, and mean Salesforce’s multi-billion-dollar investments in making reporting and analytics tools that normal people can use (without needing an advanced degree in statistical mathematics) to derive genuine insight and drive smarter people strategy.

“The reporting side has been really helpful,” says CAP’s Anna Haldane. “Things like gender pay gap reporting were taking a huge amount of time before. We wanted to provide better reporting functionality which, without the system in place, was just impossible to do.”

Making the case for a Salesforce HRMS

If your technology leaders are already bought into the Salesforce platform, the case for implementing an on-platform HRMS solution becomes easier to make. Their understanding of the platform means that many of the benefits listed above will be old news for them. The resource burden of implementation and maintenance – and therefore the total cost of ownership – are reduced because the skills required already exist in house.

For the C-suite, the single-platform approach offers an opportunity to get different business functions on the same technology page, enabling enhanced organisational reporting, increased operational efficiency, better employee engagement, more visibility and enhanced decision making.

If you’re currently working to attain leadership buy-in for a new HR solution, download our free, comprehensive whitepaper where we delve into the detaisl of how people teams can achieve buy-in and go on to ensure their implementation project is a success.

The xcd people platform is the only HMRC-approved, single solution HR & Payroll solution available on the Salesforce platform. If you’re ready to see how it works, you can book a demo today.