Improved processes are the main motivating factor for organisations to implement, upgrade or replace their human capital management (HCM) solutions (50.69%), followed by improved employee management ability (44.44%) and reduced costs (42.36%).
This emerged from the ITWeb/HR survey, which ran online for 14 days in October, attracting 159 responses.
Due to their organisations' uncertainty of whether to implement, upgrade or replace their HCM solutions, 27% of respondents admitted they had no plans in place for this, while the majority (53.47%) were unsure.
"Organisations need to pay more attention to the planning of their HCM systems," says Gerhard Stegmann, HCM account executive Africa at SAP.
Stegmann continues: "Firstly, the implementation or replacement of an HCM system is extremely important for the successful management of the modern workforce and for the survival of the business in this competitive world. There is a war for talent being raged out there and it is not just about paying salaries only anymore. Organisations need to determine what their edge is and plan to acquire and implement an HCM solution that provides that.
"Secondly, the planning of upgrades is also key in taking advantage of the latest enhancements, which may address a critical need and also assist in providing the edge over their competitors."
The study also polled the respondents on whether their organisations are considering adopting HCM applications for the cloud. Twenty-six percent said they are reluctant to adopt these services, while 13.79% said on-premise ownership is still preferred.
"Customers who have adopted cloud services have reported many benefits, including faster implementation, faster delivery, proven configuration, high security structures, no infrastructure or administration required, ease-of-consumption, and low total cost of ownership," says Stegmann.
"As with anything new, you always have the fast adopters and then those who are reluctant to follow until it becomes the standard, which I believe is happening globally. The main reason is ignorance, especially around security."
According to the survey, the majority (69.80%) of respondents considered the most important feature of an HCM system to be user-friendliness. Stegmann points out that a user-friendly HCM system brings HR within reach of most people who did not previously have such a luxury.
The second most important feature of an HCM solution cited by respondents (53.35%) is low implementation costs.
"HCM systems could not always be implemented within a very short timeframe due to the unique and complex nature of some customer practices, among other reasons. This can be addressed by offering customer success stories where standard practices have been adopted, which reduced the time to value, and obviously costs, drastically - also over the long term, as upgrades could be done swiftly and without much disruption."
On a scale of one to five, with one being not important and five very important, 40% of respondents scored talent management as very important to their organisations' business strategies; only 3.33% said it was not important.
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