HRA hits 20 years old.

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Bruce Anderson

In May of 2011, Vantage Point Software, dba HRA Employee Solutions, hit 20 years old. That’s a lifetime in the HRIS industry, a lifetime in technology and, in fact, a lifetime to be in business. A great celebration was held at the Listel Hotel following the HRA Conference 2011. Many special clients from over the years were invited to the celebration and were treated to a historical montage of the company with pictures going right back to 1991. Many pictures included those clients themselves. Of course everyone looks exactly the same today as they do in the pictures!

HRA HRIS HR Software celebrates 20 years.

Bruce Anderson was the founder of the company in 1991 and has been the president since. Bruce Ferguson, the Director of Sales & Marketing, flew in from across the country to join the celebration “Ferguson” joined the company just two years later so he has been with the company 18 years. These two have formed the core of HRA for its duration and continue to lead the way through the myriad of challenges and competition.

HRA has gone through a great many changes over the 20 years, not the least of which has been keeping up with the never-ending changes in technology. The HRA Global HRIS must always work with the latest technology and on the latest platforms. It is a seemingly endless to do but on that HRA achieves year after year. To think that the HRA HR Software was originally written in the DOS environment, then got rewritten into the Windows environment, then got rewritten again in the Web environment, all while maintaining product functionality, client satisfaction and continuous data compatibility is truly amazing. HRA has survived through many economic downturns and market crashes. Again, an amazing feat. Looking at the pictures, it was amazing to see the transformations of people and product. 20 years is a generation.

Perhaps the most surprising outcome of 20 years in business was the number of bonds and friendships that have been formed between the staff and the clients. It truly shows how HRA cares about their clients, their products and the success of the products for their clients. HRA really knows each and every client well and forms a unique bond with each one. For some clients, purchasing the HRA HRIS truly proved to be a life changing decision.

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Taking ownership of your HRIS

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Bruce Anderson

hr software  

Life is interesting as an HR Software vendor. It is particularly interesting when you sell what can be termed as an “off-the-shelf” program. I call it that because we give the same HRIS program to every client. Now the program has 20 years of development into it and over 100 options that can be turned on or off or are multiple choice but each and every client gets exactly the same program shell. How they use it is up to them and it is fascinating to watch the variation in how much people use it, how they use and what they think of it.

First of all, the variation in how much people use their HRMS is interesting to start with. Some people have fully embraced it and their HRA HRIS is an integral part of their organization. HRA is used in every department related to an HR function. Each specialist uses their portion of HRA and the management can see it all. Managers have access to their employees only and their reports are automatically filtered to their reports. At the opposite end, we have clients where their HRIS is nothing more than a glorified telephone book.

In how they use their HRA HRIS, some clients have given all their employees their own access via the Employee Self-Serve and the employees are happily checking their records and entering in all their time. HR is completely relieved of a significant number of their phone calls because the employees can look up the information themselves. In some cases the employees only enter their exception time, as in time absent, and in other companies the employees are entering both their time worked and their time absent. So far we have not seen any companies give their employees access to their full records. Those that have used the employee self-serve are only giving their employees access to parts of their records. HRA hides the other modules so the employees are unaware of this but I am waiting for the penny to drop one day and hear that an employee has demanded to have their entire record opened up to them.

Now this leaves what they think if their HRA HRIS. My opinion is that 90% of the time the actual HRIS is independent of their opinion. The reason is that most of the complaints or issues that we deal with surrounding our HR Software are actually related to the people using the software and not to the software itself. I really don’t believe it would make any difference which software program they had. The issues would remain because what is really at stake is one of: lack of organization, lack of accountability and/or lack of responsibility.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that 90% of our clients are having problems with their HRIS/HRMS! In fact very few are. I mean that 90% of those that are having problems are related to internal staff issues and are nothing to do with whichever software program they are using.

Now being a vendor that may be a one-sided opinion but I have been watching this for 20 years now.

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How To Make your HRIS Work For You

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Bruce Anderson

HRIS systems are in use in most companies and are becoming commonplace everywhere. However, it is important for companies to not just follow the trend without thought, but rather they should consider their own needs and requirements associated wHR Softwareith their HRIS software. Installing an HRIS system is the easy part. Making one work for you in a way that it benefits your organization and makes a significant difference is not so easy. If you have an HRIS or are in the process of implementing one, here are some thoughts for you.

In order to make sure that your HRIS implementation is effective and that your effort of introducing new HRIS software is successful and beneficial you should be careful to choose a system that your employees will adopt, embrace and enjoy using. No matter which HRMS you introduce, the most important factor is the degree to which the employees and managers come to embrace the system because it is the employees and managers who are going to make the difference and who will make the system effective and successful or not. Spending time and effort at the beginning of the process to choose the right HRIS software is essential and can be crucial to the overall success of the implementation. Many software products, in any area of software, look good during the sales presentation with all their fancy features and pizzazz but they are not so appealing for the users to use on a daily basis.

Determining whether a particular program will be good for you, your employees and your organization can be difficult. Two of the best ways to determine this is to get a trial version of the program so that you can try it out yourselves and also to talk to existing users.

Other than the employee adoption consideration, two other important factors for the success of the HR software are the areas of administration and reporting. In order to succeed for administration, the HR software must save time and be easy to configure and learn. Using the new system should be seen as an opportunity to gain access to information and bring positive benefits to the organization rather than being difficult or a hassle. And it will be seen as a hassle if it does not give provide good reporting.. Good reporting is perhaps the most important aspect of HR Software.

Another important factor if you want your new HRMS to work for you is that you need to make sure that the software that manages the employee data allows for importing and exporting so that you can get and send data from and to other programs you use within your organization. This will allow your company achieve the goals of being paperless – a pipedream in most organizations.

When there is access and transparency in employee data management employees can see where they stand in the organization and the system will be deemed to be beneficial. Considering that your HRIS may be new to your organization, you need to make sure that it is embraced by all involved.

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HRIS Systems – More than Glorified Address Books

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Bruce Anderson

Working as an Implementation Specialist for an HR Software company means that I get to hear about dozens of different HRIS systems. Though my role is to help our clients implement the HRIS offered by my company, part of that process includes learning about their current HRIS and what they see as downfalls of the system as a way to help determine what they want to do differently going forward. Occasionally they will recount stories of the handful of HRIS systems they reviewed during their search process for a new HRIS, mainly to point out what ours offers to meet their needs that other systems did not. This really helps the implementation process get off on a good foot, as we have identified their goals for the new HRIS.  

Their displeasure with their current HRIS system often reflects the idea that it has nothing to offer. When they describe their current uses of the system, it sounds as though it is nothing more than a “glorified address book” (to quote a colleague of mine). When we begin to discuss what they want to use our HRIS for (for example: tracking leave, benefits administration, performance management, etc.), we ask how much of this information can be found in their current system so that we might simply import it into their new one. Once we begin to go through each area they identify, it becomes apparent that their current HRIS could be much more useful than it is, and perhaps a large part of their displeasure with it stems from losing site of their initial purposes for the system. This is something that I work to avoid with each company implementing our HRIS.

When a company purchases our HRIS system and we begin the HRIS implementation process, one of the first things we do is re-establish their goals and identify a date by which they want to have the system implemented and in use. We will then typically break this down into sections, and the first stage always includes populating the current, basic employee information (including employee numbers, addresses, phone numbers, current positions and salaries, etc.). This stage can take a lot of work as the HR team typically has to comb through their data and make sure everything is accurate before we import it or set it up in our HRIS. Because of the work involved in this first step, having all of that basic information in our HRIS becomes a milestone for those involved in the implementation – at that point they can begin to work within the new system to add new employees and keep current employees up to date; management is happy because there is something to show for all the work done until this point and the implementation process slows down a bit. Slowing down is the opposite of what we want, and it can be part of the reason some companies never use their HRIS systems to their full potential.

Implementing an HRIS system is rarely someone’s full-time job; this is typically a task they are given on top of their current projects and daily tasks, so it can be quite difficult to find the time to implement the system in its entirety. That is why it is important to keep in mind your reasons for implementing an HRMS in the first place – don’t lose sight of your goals. In my case, part of my job is helping our clients remember what those goals were when they began looking at HR Software systems and revising those goals for changes in their environment, changes in HR and changes in HRIS systems. Remember what you wanted to get out of your HRIS and make sure to revisit those goals on a regular basis to ensure that you are using your system to its fullest potential and not simply as an address book.

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Using Vacation Request Forms with Employee Self Service in an HRIS

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Bruce Anderson

vacation_request_formThere are a lot of companies out there still relying on paper forms for their process of requesting and approving time off. Where time means money, these companies should consider moving to an electronic vacation request form. Firstly, companies should consider giving employees access to their own record to view their leave entitlement, time they have taken and how much time they have left via an employee self service in the HRIS. This makes less work for the HR Team and makes it a little easier for employees to request time off. Following that, you can put the entire vacation request process into an electronic format.

Giving your employees access to view their leave entitlements through your HRIS really cuts down on the calls your HR personnel receive about how much time they have left to take; but you can free up even more time by cutting out all the work that still has to be done in completing paper vacation request forms. You still have to organize and file all of those papers, consolidate each employee’s request with the time they have remaining to take, then look at a calendar to see if anyone else has booked that time off, and complete the paper form to approve or deny the vacation request. If you can’t accommodate the time the employee has requested, the employee goes through the whole process again for a different set of dates. Maybe you approve requests based on seniority date or on a first-come-first-serve basis; this means checking seniority dates and other scheduled vacation time as well. Vacation requests can become a very tedious process when done on paper.

Giving employees access to view their leave details via an employee self service in your HRIS can really help smooth out the process of leave requests.

Why not eliminate the hassles of dealing with paper forms, and switch to an electronic vacation request form? There is software available that is specifically designed for scheduling vacation requests, or you can look at the process of requesting and scheduling vacation within your HR Software. Consider the following as an alternative to paper forms.

An employee logs into the employee self serve and reviews how much time they have available for vacation. From there they can send a message to their supervisor asking for time off, which will indicate the dates they want off, what type of time off, the total hours or days they are requesting and any other specific details they want to include. Because the request is being sent through your HRIS, the supervisor will have the employee name, employee number, seniority date, position, and vacation entitlement details all within a click of their mouse to efficiently review the employee’s request. They can view the time off request directly in a calendar showing all of their employees’ requested and scheduled vacation so they can quickly determine if they can grant the employee’s request, or if they need to ask them to choose different dates. If they choose to approve the request, they do so directly in the HRIS leave calendar, and the employee is notified of the approval. If they cannot accommodate the time, they can remove it from the calendar and send the employee a message asking them to select a different date.

It just seems to make good sense –give your employees access to their leave through your HR Software and consider taking the next step and using an electronic vacation request form as part of your leave request process. This will cut out the paper work and the time delay that comes with it for requesting time off. Plus, if you use your HRIS for this, it means you do not need to manually enter time taken as it will already be in there.

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How do you choose your HR Software?

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Bruce Anderson

A Note from the President of HRA Employee Solutions

There are many HRIS and Applicant Tracking Software vendors in the marketplace today and possibly many products that would suit your needs. How do you choose one from the next when there are so many factors to consider?

We looked at this question from our side too. We looked at the fact that we have been developing and advancing our HRIS since 1991. We looked at our 90/10 rule. The rule is that we attempt to offer at least 90% of what the bigger systems provide and do it for 10% of the price. We looked at the fact that we took many years to create and shape an incredible report writer to suit the HRIS industry and HR Professionals – a report writer that is truly a standout We then looked at our target market of 25-5,000 employees with all the purchase options that we offer from buying to renting, from self-hosting to cloud hosting to a lite version for startups.

Next we looked at our implementation and support processes that we have developed and refined over the years through so many installations in so many situations and industries. Finally we looked at the fact that we have had a number of clients with us for over 15 years along with the fact that we are a smaller company and deliver a more personalized service.

So what are the deciding factors for choosing HR Software? How do we differentiate ourselves and how do our clients differentiate us? The answer is that it seems to be different with every client and is usually based on one or more of the items above. I invite you to contact us and determine what would make HRA a standout HRIS for you.

Sincerely
Bruce

 

Bruce Anderson
President

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Hello world!

Posted on January 1, 2011 by Bruce Anderson

Welcome to the new HRA Employee Solutions Blog. Here we will be posting news and thoughts about HRA and about HRIS and Applicant Tracking Sofware in general.

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