Transforming your HR and payroll technology landscape?

Why cloud transformations stall

Cloud migrations have many unseen disadvantages and pitfalls, especially for customers leaving flexible on-premise solutions like SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle for highly standardized cloud and SaaS products. Plenty of large enterprises have had to stop a cloud implementation and re-evaluate priorities after realizing it was a much bigger undertaking than the selection phase had assessed.

Not surprisingly, the sales process is often designed to gloss over the critical gaps. It pays to spend time analyzing your current organizational needs first.

Plan before you engage vendors

A well thought out evaluation and planning strategy helps you:

• Deep dive into your internal organizational and stakeholder requirements and critical success factors before engaging a vendor.
• Build a standard evaluation methodology on which to measure all vendors equally against those requirements.
• Make the most informed, quantifiable decisions on your next-generation application landscape, data integration and archiving options.

You, your employees, contractors and applicants will live with the impacts of this decision for many years, so it is worth the extra time and effort. The return on the investment also arrives faster when you decommission the legacy infrastructure in parallel.

Five critical success factors

1. Self-evaluate before you shop. Assess your requirements before engaging any vendor so you can rank vendors on practical, quantifiable criteria rather than “cool” or catchy functionality.
2. Take the evaluation phase seriously. Due diligence on new offerings is critical to getting the best fit.
3. Line up conversion and integration resources. Ensure strong support from internal and external data conversion and integration resources with cloud-based technology experience.
4. Expect to fill gaps. Recognize the need for other technologies and partners for security, integration and conversion. The cloud is not a silver bullet for every process and tool; a best-of-breed landscape takes careful design.
5. Don’t bite off more than your organization can chew. Changing all systems at once can mean not going live with anything on time. Consider phased functional or geographic approaches rather than “big bang” implementations of HCM, payroll, time, benefits and finance.

Do this first

Take the following steps, in this order:

1. Look at what works and what does not in your current environment.
2. Run self-evaluation questionnaires and workshops to gather requirements from HR, payroll, benefits and timekeeping.
3. Weight your decision factors. Are you heavily hourly and unionized, or mostly salaried? Do you need advanced shift planning? Where is self-service critical? How does each factor drive business objectives?
4. Develop an evaluation matrix weighted by those requirements according to priority and impact.
5. Engage vendors. Ask peer groups who they use and what they like and don’t like, and shortlist those that could fit your needs.
6. Schedule demos with your questions and criteria in hand.
7. Take as long as you need; salespeople are happy to revisit until you have the answers.

Shortlist, rank and select

Using the requirements you gathered and the weighted evaluation matrix, rank the vendors and select a partner. Now staff up and implement. Don’t overlook training, integration and data migration strategies; it is never too early to plan them.

Don’t do these things

• Ignore training budgets.
• Get hung up on PEPM (price per employee per month). These are rarely apples-to-apples comparisons, and vendors constantly shift pricing between capital and operating expenditures and between services and products.
• Gloss over support models. Support from a standard cloud or SaaS vendor is very different from having in-house technical expertise on hand.
• Assume SaaS vendors and implementation partners are agile. Most still follow a waterfall model, so beware of a mismatch with a heavily agile culture.
• Plan on major headcount reduction from efficiencies gained. Moving to the cloud does not reduce dependence on internal subject matter experts and IT; some areas need more people during the transition.
• Ignore your current-state analysis. Processes that seem minor today can turn into major functionality and resourcing gaps when you standardize into a SaaS model.
• Gloss over testing, which may be needed frequently because SaaS functionality is updated constantly.
• Write off enterprise tools for data encryption, migration and integration.
• Assume you already have the skills in current cloud technologies.
• Forget your HR analytics reporting strategy, which is typically obstructed by data scattered across three to five or more core systems, old and new.

Where Fuse Analytics fits

Most of the pitfalls above have a data component; that is where Fuse Analytics comes in.

• Decommission in parallel. Archive the legacy system so its records stay accessible while the license and maintenance costs stop, instead of keeping UKG, ADP or another old platform alive for its history.
• Convert and migrate only what the new system needs. Our data conversion and migration services fill the resourcing gap in success factor three.
• Keep the historical baseline. Old records seldom map cleanly into the new HCM’s data model; the archive gives your HR analytics a baseline instead of a blind spot.
• Stay compliant through the change. Retention policies, audit access and data subject requests keep working across old and new systems with the compliance tooling.

For more on moving people data, read how the cloud changed migrating human resource data and how to break up with your HR vendor. If the transformation is part of a merger or acquisition, start with the M&A compliance assessment.