Have you ever wondered what HRMS means? Or maybe you’re looking for intuitive software solutions to help streamline HR tasks and manage your entire workforce in one place?
Enter HRMS (or Human Resources Management System) – a comprehensive technology solution designed to help companies across industries optimize their core human capital management processes and improve productivity and engagement throughout all areas of their workforce.
Read on to learn more about the capabilities and components of HRMS solutions and where our senior consultants can help kickstart your HRMS journey.
What is an HRMS?
Human Resources Management Systems offer a comprehensive suite of software applications that organizations can leverage to manage core HR functions and initiatives throughout the entire employee lifecycle. HRMS supports tasks ranging from payroll processing to employee data management, recruitment, training, benefits, talent management, and more.
An HRMS allows an organization to better understand its workforce while staying compliant with labor laws and industry regulations in the process.
Who Uses Human Resource Management Systems?
HR professionals are the primary users of HRMS systems, as they do most of the core HR tasks on a daily basis. However, HR is just one of the many departments that can benefit from HRMS software.
Organizations can empower their employees and managers to improve productivity and control their user experiences by leveraging self-service tools for basic tasks. Employees in executive roles can use an HRMS to generate data on workforce trends and make better business decisions in the future.
HR leaders have made the switch to cloud-based HRMS solutions for benefits such as:
- Better employee engagement, productivity, and satisfaction
- Innovative work culture that leverages current and emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
- Aligned strategies for a company’s people and business processes
Features of HRMS
Here’s a look at some of the main features of a human resource management system:
Benefits Administration:
This feature helps HR leaders create plans, build eligibility regulations, and make payments to benefits providers. Benefits administration capabilities also provide self-service, open enrollment, and other built-in tools to ensure total costs are aligned with accounting objectives and benefits requirements over time.
Education Management:
These features provide employee education and development courses and curricula that help staff members acquire or develop new skills and certifications. This training also helps businesses to monitor necessary compliance training initiatives and meet development requirements.
Centralized Employee Records:
HRMS provides a single system and source of truth to help employees manage, store, update, and maintain records over time. This lowers compliance costs and provides better-quality reporting and auditing functions to ensure data is managed accurately and efficiently.
Reporting and Analytics:
Advanced reporting functions enable the execution of operational reports to track HR data, maintain reporting compliance, create key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the success of HR processes, and integrate HR metrics into financial dashboards.
This facilitates more efficient enterprise-wide planning, analysis, and decision-making initiatives and ensures accurate data management across the entire organization.
Talent Management:
This allows HR leaders to assess employee engagement, performance, and development through in-depth performance reviews, goal-setting, and competency and skills tests.
Rewards:
This component helps users determine accurate net employee payments by calculating salaries, hourly wages, variable expenses for bonuses, overtime, sales commissions, shift differentials, merit raises, and withholding deductions as needed.
Other benefits occasionally offered in this feature set include matched retirement contributions or reimbursements for cell phone costs.
Talent Acquisition:
Before transferring new hires to hiring managers to begin onboarding, recruiters can build career pages for the company’s website, create job requisitions and descriptions, and manage vacant positions.
With advanced talent acquisition capabilities, users can also integrate open positions with job boards, manage candidate resumes, and track applicants through the recruiting process to ensure the right candidates are hired and placed in the right positions.
User Interface:
Today’s systems include employee management and self-service tools, mobile app capabilities, customized dashboards, and automated notifications to keep staff members engaged and reduce reliance on HR and IT departments.
Time and Attendance:
The time and attendance component allows users to process time off requests, schedule employees, and handle absences. It also combines timecards with payroll and projects to ensure a seamless experience across teams and departments.
Workforce Management:
Workforce planning allows users to budget and plan for workforce costs and compare planned costs to actual ones. Users can also leverage workforce management features to prioritize recruitment efforts, develop succession plans, and identify talent gaps across teams.
With advanced workforce management tools, users can also streamline and manage compensation planning, performance management, and learning tasks.
HRIS vs. HRMS
The terms HRMS and HRIS, Human Resources Information System, are often used interchangeably; however, there are a few key differences between the two solutions.
HRIS systems originated in the 1980s when management information systems (MIS) were more widely used to refer to IT departments rather than HR departments. HRIS was created due to the computerization and automation of HR processes and information across the entire organization.
While HRMS and HRIS are both used to refer to software solutions that store employee data and streamline HR procedures, HRMS involves a complete system used to manage employee information, while a Human Resource Information System involves a smaller database system used to track specific employee data sources.
Advantages of HRMS Software
Here are the top 5 advantages of dealing with a human resources management system:
Better Insights:
Without an HRMS, gaining a clear view of workforce costs can be nearly impossible since data can be acquired from multiple sources, including spreadsheets, paper records, and more. HRMS allows all data to be accessed and stored in a single place, increasing data integrity and faster decision-making across the board.
Improved Engagement:
An HRMS system can curate specialized learning plans, training plans, mentoring programs, and career paths to track development activities and identify core development milestones for employees.
Cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) and HRMS systems are transforming workforce management processes for the entire team, making it easier for employees to remain committed to their individual tasks and the organization as a whole
Efficient Company Culture:
Did you know that up to 40% of an HR professional’s week can be spent responding to questions or managing significant programs, such as benefits enrollment or performance reviews?
HR processes like processing timesheets, managing job requisitions, and keeping track of leave requests that call for numerous levels of approval can be extremely time-consuming.
To automate these tasks and other important activities, an HRMS offers approval workflows, which alert approvers when it’s their turn to approve (or reject) requests and reduce processing time by more than 50%.
Quick Recruiting: HR professionals are responsible for attracting top talent and building the company’s reputation, but it can be challenging to acquire insight into the hiring process when job postings occur outside of the organization.
But, because an HRMS system streamlines and improves the hiring process, recruiters and candidates can connect and build relationships via job boards and mobile applications. And, when new positions become available, human resources departments can use candidate-pooling technologies to speed up the hiring process.
Lower Back-end Costs:
From an IT and capital investment perspective, the centralized HRMS structure requires less hardware, data center storage space, and IT and development staff resources for maintenance, support, and training.
This is especially true for systems sold in a fully cloud-based, software-as-a-service model. It also necessitates fewer help desk employees, improves employee satisfaction, and justifies IT expenditures for advanced HR technology.
Choosing an HRMS
Here are a few things to consider when choosing the right HRMS for your needs:
- Enterprise Resource Planning: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) integrates with other business applications to give users a better feel for employee data centralization. And, with lower integration costs, an ERP model allows for a more consistent user experience across teams, departments, and company locations.
- Best Breed Providers: These providers typically offer more advanced features with less complex user interfaces.
- Service Providers: They provide fully outsourced solutions and act as a supplement for your HR department, meaning fewer internal HR professionals are needed to complete the same tasks and achieve the same goals.
HRMS Security
Here are some security requirements all HRMS customers should consider a “must”:
System Segmentation:
The HRMS must be set up so that only certain data can be accessed by users in certain roles. Some companies have established security processes to allow HR professionals access to only the parts of the workforce they serve.
Role-Based Access:
Often, HR personnel need more advanced access privileges than the rest of the workforce. While some tasks related to individual employee data can be accessed by both the employee and the HR team, all tasks required to administer constituencies should be supported by internal HR teams and the HRMS.
Two-Factor Authentication:
Mobile phone access helps HR teams simplify the implementation of two-factor authentication technology and add an additional layer of protection for sensitive employee information.
Data Encryption:
All employee data must be encrypted both when it is in the HRMS at rest and when it is sent to each individual end user.
Password Policies:
To help prevent unauthorized access to HRMS data and keep employees safe, your IT staff should set requirements for password length, complexity, and frequency of resets.
How We Can Help
Whether you need help implementing an intuitive human resource management system to streamline your business operations or just an extra hand beginning your journey with HRMS software, Surety Systems can help!
Our senior-level HCM consultants have the skills and experience you need to successfully implement new HRMS software solutions and make the most of your technological investment in the long run.
Contact Us
If you’re interested in learning more about HRMS solutions and where our experienced HRMS consultants can fit into your organization, contact us today!
