Many South African organisations have changed dramatically from relying on payroll as their human resource (HR) record systems since the advent of complex local labour legislation and international advancements in human capital management (HCM) software development and the benefits these offer from a competitive perspective.
So says Gerhard Stegmann, account executive at SAP Africa, who adds that the global war for talent has added to the demand for investment in sophisticated HCM software to be able to attract, develop, retain and incentivise people.
"The new generations of employees demand certain 'social and collaborative tools' from their organisations, and failing that, they will quickly find another organisation to work for where these tools are offered to make their work life more interesting and fun."
ITWeb and SAP are currently running an HR Survey to measure customer satisfaction with the various HR solutions on the market, as well as any points of dissatisfaction.
Stegmann explains that the organisational changes required are based on international best practices or international standard practices for HCM, which is required by most world-class HCM software providers.
"These standards can be likened to GAAP [Globally Accepted Accounting Practices] in finance, only HCM standards have never been published as global standards."
However, he notes that very few organisations in SA or elsewhere in the world have implemented a comprehensive competency model.
"So how do they recruit and select the most competent applicants? How do they ensure performance goals are linked to the strategic business intent or drivers and those who do not perform are further developed if this should mean a lack of certain competencies? But they all are usually very keen to do talent management."
According to Stegmann, his company's offering, SAP HCM, forms an integral part of the SAP ERP offering and is delivered to any customer or organisation that needs to deploy an ERP solution, without attracting any additional licence costs to the ERP sale.
He also claims that the adoption of SAP HCM in SA has outperformed competitors and has only been increasing in recent years, especially since the company fixed the standard HCM practices in the scope (fixed scope or deliverables), fixed the price and fixed the timelines to a drastically reduced time-to-value offering.
"This is called RDS or Rapid Deployment Solutions. So the market knows 'what they are in for' when acquiring SAP HCM," he says.
Stegmann notes that the main challenges SAP HCM is faced with are no different to those of most of the HCM software providers locally and internationally.
"Customers are usually slow to upgrade their software to take advantage of the latest and greatest innovations we offer.
"The changing labour legislation in SA is another such example, which requires very rapid incorporation of such changes into our software to be delivered to the market. Government does not usually provide enough prior notice of such changes."
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