The benefits of having your HR platform on Salesforce

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

It can seem like a minefield.

So, 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 is how technology bods refer 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. Good news for IT leaders, but what does it mean for HR?

XCD is a comprehensive HRMS application built solely on Salesforce, which means, for organisations already on the platform, a whole heap of benefits:

Cost

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 HRMS through Salesforce, 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.

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. You can be up and running in as little as two weeks from the start of your project.

Similarly, when it comes to adoption, training a workforce on an HRMS solution that’s based on a familiar user interface they already use 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,” says Clare Riddiford from 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 human Resources operation.

“We like to do things our way,” says Denise Moss, Human Capital Project Manager at the global asset management firm Ninety One. “We want technology that supports us but doesn’t put us in a box. We’ve been able to configure many different modules to meet our unique requirements.”

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? It happens.

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.

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

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.

XCD 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, or if you have questions and you’d like to speak to an expert, get in touch using our website chat function.