The challenge of facing up to legislative compliance in the human resource management and labour relations market, combined with a highly volatile trading environment, will test the ingenuity and resources of all South African companies well into the new millennium, says Pieter van Schalkwyk, managing director of visAbility Solutions.
Van Schalkwyk, commenting on the burden of managing recent or pending legislation associated with labour laws, employment equity accounting and skills development, says that many companies may be forced to restructure their businesses.
"If companies are to deal successfully with the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, the Labour Relations Act, the Employment Equity Act, the Skills Training and Development Bill, they will need to carefully examine current business processes and resources," says van Schalkwyk..
"Employers can no longer regard HR and personnel management as a pure administrative function to be consigned to the `back office`, categorised as a cost centre and assigned manual-intensive or stand-alone computer systems.
"Almost without exception companies will be forced to implement IT-enabled systems - solutions that can be integrated into an organisation`s total business process to deliver more value than ever before," he says.
Van Schalkwyk believes there is a tendency among South African companies to stick to rigid, partitioned company structures.
"The partitioning of companies into islands of responsibility such as accounting, sales, marketing, administration, personnel, information technology, manufacturing, technical and others, tends to create barriers and, in extreme cases, the potential for conflict within the organisation itself.
"Many leading medium to large enterprises are already addressing this issue by adopting enterprise resource planning (ERP) strategies. However, the development and implementation of highly specialised modules within an ERP solution, such as HR management, can be time-consuming and costly," he warns.
Van Schalkwyk points out that visAbility`s solutions, which are totally integrated solutions in their own right and based on Microsoft`s Windows platform and the Delphi development environment, are designed to be quickly and easily integrated into all the leading ERP applications.
"Although Sybase has been chosen as our primary data base engine, the ability to interface into any other system helps guarantee that HR management modules, as part of a total ERP solution, are quickly and easily tailored to meet the client`s needs," he says.
Van Schalkwyk also stresses the importance of visAbility`s approach to dealing with the challenges of HR and labour relations reporting procedures contained in the various acts and proposed bills.
"By their very nature these pieces of legislation are extremely complex legal documents that are couched in terms that even the most experienced human resource practitioner may find difficult to understand and interpret.
"Based on expert opinion, in-depth research and extensive development visAbility has produced a system that shields the user from the complexities of legal and human resource jargon.
"Designed as an essential business tool that helps manage and control priceless human assets, the visAbility solution goes far beyond the functionality and capabilities of conventional human resources packages," he says.
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