Importance of BPM in Human Resources
Human resource spending, in several companies across the world, range from 40-60% of the total company costs. Considering the magnitude of impact human resources can have on a company’s bottom line, HR processes are often a key focus for the in house compliance groups. These processes are top priority, especially for HR intensive businesses, as they are linked to sensitive issues like reporting of financials, and data and system access to employees.
Why Improving HR Processes Can Be Difficult and How Can BPM Help
Despite the importance and critical nature of HR processes, many companies find it difficult to streamline these to ensure full compliance and high visibility. This leads to redundancies and loss of efficiency in processes, costing the company valuable resources. HR departments of companies are riddled with loads of documentation and activities relating to risk assessments, which leave them with little or no time to think about or improve the processes’ efficiency.
More and more companies are now choosing to automate their HR processes not only to improve efficiency, but also to mitigate several process related risks. Companies are automating the full spectrum of HR processes starting from hiring, payroll to terminations. BPM is allowing them to make these changes faster, and in a much safer and quicker way than customizing their existing HR management systems.
Benefits of BPM in HR Processes
BPM has many benefits to offer when it comes to improving HR processes:
BPM allows for real time monitoring of processes and helps identify bottlenecks. Tasks can be easily escalated when required and the managers can be alerted for quick actions, making way for quicker, smarter and more compliant processes.
Using integration of systems at the back end, automatic routing of tasks and electronic format forms, BPM can help get rid of up to 90% of admin HR work, which eats up considerable company resources every year.
Companies get complete audit trail of processes and documentation, making it easier for them to ensure compliance.
Another key advantage of using BPM is getting high level of visibility into the processes. This facilitates faster identification of issues, higher employee satisfaction and cost savings for the company.
A BPM system connects various pieces of information available within different departments and sections of the organization pertaining to a single key. For example, for employee Keith (the key), information about his date of joining, salary, perks etc may be drawn from the employment records. This is linked to his current designation, present project, details of his team and supervisor, and the most recent performance appraisal. Keith’s record is also linked to his leave record and other activity details. Say, Keith has applied for a 10 day vacation – with the BPM system, his manager will have a bird’s eye view of whether Keith is eligible for leave and whether any critical projects will be affected by his absence. The manager can just talk to Keith’s project head and get his approval for the leave within minutes. With a paper based documentation system, the same process would take days.
The results of using BPM to improve HR processes have been nothing short of spectacular. But this is not surprising if you consider a recent study by Gartner (titled ‘What’s Cooking in BPM’) that revealed that BPM projects had a more than 90% success rate with about half the projects concluding in under 4 months span