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Product Focus: ActiveSuite – four reasons why PRM works
There is much passionate debate in HR circles as to whether it’s better to have a large integrated ERP system to manage information or go for a ‘best-of-breed’ approach, tying together the right tools for each area. Getting people to agree is difficult, but a new approach can mean not having to choose one or the other.
Supporters of each approach often remain deaf to the opposing arguments:
- Richness of functionality in a specialised tool OR homogenisation of information flows in standardised processes.
- Rapid phased deployment OR enterprise-wide initiatives
- Excellent local execution OR global coherency in process
As often occurs with this kind of question, both points of view have strong arguments in their favour. Leading HR professionals know this and are now adopting an approach that allows combined People Relationship Management (PRM) strategies to attract, develop and retain employees.
Are you ERP or Best of Breed?
If you refuse to answer this question and always prefer to have the best of both worlds, then you are not alone. Carrefour, Rabobank, Xerox, France Telecom and 45 other international groups have chosen a PRM solution to optimise their HR information systems.
Jobpartners developed its ActiveSuite solutions to address the market need for straightforward answers to help organisations rationalise and exploit technology. Instead of being stuck in an endless cycle of technical development and customisation, ActiveSuite supports rapid roll-out of solutions to support strategic HR initiatives – getting results next quarter makes a big difference.
The ActiveRecruit solution suite is:
- exclusively built around the concept of People Relationship Management
- open to all management and business processes which affect the attraction, development and retention of talent, for example: recruitment, internal mobility, career management, performance management, development planning and succession planning
- completely open to integration with HRIS systems, complementary to ERP systems and other solutions for personnel management and administration
Jobpartners’ ActiveSuite is a unique solution in the marketplace for enterprise software.
Management information – the ‘poor relative’ of HRIS
Human Resources Information Systems are typically based 90% on the administrative management. Much HR software is aimed at the standardisation of administration in different legal environments with a focus on pay, working hours and training certification.
As these processes have many things in common between different organisations they can be standardised to a certain extent. However, the different strategies and initiatives human resources professionals can choose to adopt and combine are highly dependent on unique organisation objectives and sensitive to small differences.
The specific nature of the challenges facing and organisation and the strategic choices its management has made mean that to optimise HR processes can often require tailor-made solutions.
This systematic approach means that the development of employer/employee relationships means that solutions must:
- be highly flexible, easy to deploy and accessible to all people
- have the ability aggregate, homogenize, store and exploit data, converting it into information to help managers
This management information can be a principal driver for talent development and is often the least shared in organisations, dispersed and dormant in the heads of individuals, notes from meetings, post-its and excel sheets on personal computers.
Choosing a PRM suite
ActiveSuite was designed to address the challenges outlined above. Jobpartners constructed the solutions as a purely Internet-based platform for management information. The suite is based on 4 key principles.
1) Homogenous information
To be shared and support decision-making, information needs to be homogenous. ActiveCenter acts as an information hub, a module that permits qualitative information about each individual to be treated as one set of information drawn from multiple sources and including:
- administrative data (pulled from existing HRIS systems)
- individual aspirations
- skills and competencies
- evaluations
- individual development plans
- professional development scenarios
Bringing together all of this data and turning it into information helps establish a fair and comprehensive view of the organisation’s talent that pays a divide as managers convert it into intelligence to aid decision-making.
2) Consolidation
Many organisations today have information held in different tools and systems that function in isolation making a single view of an individual difficult. Aggregating these different reference points allows a global view of a person and avoids the assignment of simple labels, such as ‘promoted’, ‘trained’ or ‘wishes to move to a different position’.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and CEO, once commented, “the value of information grows exponentially with its defragmentation.”
Using this logic, ActiveSuite allows different HR initiatives to be run from a single management information platform as all the information to support management decision-making is available in a single space.
3) Management continuity and coherency
The organisation becomes capable of a success-driven approach to talent management:
- Clear objectives and outcomes from management processes, such as annual appraisals or special workflows
- Key competencies for the organisation – what do we have and what do we need tomorrow?
- Key positions – how do we develop individual career and sucession plans
- Evalutating the organisation as a whole by looking at key resrouces and the mix of managers, professionals, juniors and high-potential employees
ActiveSuite means prompt action can be taken to resolve day-to-day challenges while anticipating wide-ranging challenges for the future.
4) Emphasising a spirit of co-operation toward common goals
When an organisation realises that its success depends on individuals, management must focus on collaborative working practices. ActiveSuite is completely Internet-based, so its ease-of-use and access makes interaction between the individual and the enterprise painless.
In conclusion, Jobpartners believes the human processes behind attracting, developing and retaining the right people are complex. The solutions to support mangers need to be comprehensive and fine-tuned to ensure success.
ActiveSuite is now at release 9 and its maturity means it is today a natural complement to ERP and HRIS systems. We hope to talk to you more about what it can do!
