Latest Research:
Research Agenda: Finance Research Practice H2 2021
Companies have benefitted from rapid deployment of cloud-based ERP. “Customization” once delayed legacy implementations, but now “Low/No Code” environments enable personalization and better adaptation to unique business requirements. As AI, IoT, and other acronym-rich trends increase the pace of change, rapid system updates and increased leverage of available capabilities become more and more valuable. Putting predictive, intelligent, and mobile capabilities into the hands of front-line resources will further increase the payoff. The Financials and ERP practice at 3Sixty Insights plans to explore these and other themes over the next 12 months:
Research Preview: COVID-19, WFH, and the Long View: Can HCM Protect the Employee Experience?
What happens when human capital management catches COVID-19? Late last year, we asked the question in our 2021 Research Agenda. And, all last year and this, we saw the acute symptoms. Employers that didn’t have to shut down entirely transitioned by necessity to companywide work-from-home or hybrid arrangements. Organizations quickly learned they hadn’t properly anticipated or planned for the now well-documented, related challenges—of which there are many.
Now, however, the aid of hindsight shows us that COVID-19 just may have provided a lasting boon to the employee experience—specifically to the idea that the employee experience matters and cannot be ignored. This may seem odd to contemplate. Never mind that it took a pandemic and the attendant massive anomalies to business as usual for a shift in attitudes to take hold. Despite there being no line item in the general ledger to quantify the financial value of the employee experience, a positive one is essential to organizational success and must continue to be a large focus of investment post-pandemic. Opinions to the contrary have lost the sway they once had.
What Happened
In late April, Ceridian announced that it would be acquiring Ideal. The “talent intelligence software” that Ideal created draws on artificial intelligence–derived insights into the workforce. With these insights, employers become more effective in cultivating and attracting talent.
Background
For years, Ceridian has displayed a keen understanding of where to focus next, and when. When the industry needed a strong voice for straightforward HCM technology, Ceridian acquired Dayforce and became an effective mantle-bearer for the idea that you should consolidate data sets into one and employ just one application to handle as much of HCM as possible. The goal then was to improve the efficiency of HCM. The goal now, with the acquisition of Ideal, is to prepare for the future of work.
Market Alert: Paycor’s Proposed IPO Shows Small Businesses Need Both Concrete and Abstract HCM
What Happened
Paycor, provider of an end-to-end suite of software-as-a-service human capital management solutions, has filed an initial public offering, the vendor announced on April 26. Paycor seeks to raise $100 million for this IPO, according to related filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Background
A considerable percentage of Paycor’s client base comprises organizations employing 50 or fewer in staff. In recent years, however, net-new customers have been employers of 100 or more people. Competition in this space is significant. Though the approximate 1:1 comparisons to Paycor, founded in 1990, are a handful of mostly less seasoned providers all vying for the business of these small companies just beginning to grow into becoming fuller operations with grown-up needs in HCM, other, larger vendors have begun to move down market, as well, to service these employers’ needs.
What Happened
With private equity backing from K1 Investment Management to fund the maneuver, Jobvite, JazzHR and NXTThing RPO have joined to form a new, combined organization.
The Details
The three vendors made their shared announcement in a press release dated April 26. Each brand will continue to operate independently, according to the announcement, as they combine efforts—Jobvite’s in end-to-end talent acquisition technology for the enterprise, JazzHR’s in its recruiting technology for small- and medium-size businesses, and NXTThing’s as a recruitment process outsourcer. JazzHR CEO Pete Lamson assumes this role now for the entire new organization as Aman Brar transitions from his corresponding role at Jobvite to join the new entity’s Board of Directors to provide strategic direction
Presentations:
3Sixty Insights’ Brent Skinner presents Concrete and Abstract HCM: You Need Both (previously recorded during UKG’s Spring HR and Payroll eSymposium on May 13th).
HCM delivers two benefits to employers. One is concrete, the gains in productivity and efficiencies that finance appreciates. The other is abstract, the impact on employee satisfaction. All areas of HCM bring both these benefits. Even payroll. Yet, ever since the invention of HR, we have insisted on measuring HCM from a concrete perspective. This leaves half the story of HCM untold—and HR a cost center.
Businesses are finally figuring this out, fortunately. Look at the focus on employee experience that work-from-home has inspired. Look at the merger of Ultimate Software and Kronos, which marries technologies for concrete and abstract HCM to expand our understanding of the employee lifecycle. The idea that employees’ feelings influence organizational success has taken institutional root. Successful organizations in the future of work will expect no less of their investments in HCM than to produce both concrete and abstract benefits for the business.
Digitalizing Talent Learning & Development | Irene Riad – Global Executive Advisory Council Member
In May, Irene Riad joined the 3Sixty Insights End-User Global Executive Advisory Council (GEAC) Symposium to share her journey in selecting and deploying a global learning and development platform from Saba Software (now a part of Cornerstone OnDemand).
In this video, Irene, herself a member of the GEAC, shares the background, the process and the lessons learned in selecting this solution. Irene’s presentation provides a recount of her team’s overall decision-making, implementation, and approach to global adoption, all of which they undertook amidst a global re-organization and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bring Your Own Device to Work | Bill Oliver – Global Executive Advisory Council Member
In May, Bill Oliver of Oliver Advisory Group joined the 3Sixty Insights End-User Global Executive Advisory Council (GEAC) Symposium to share how organizations should be approaching their corporate policy and strategy around employee usage of personally owned devices for work-related activities.
In this video Bill covers:
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- What exactly the term Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) means
- Why it makes sense and what devices are considered personally owned
- The risk of having these devices in play
- What a BYOD should policy cover
- Training and education organizations should be deploying
Blog Articles:
Tuning Up Your ERP/Finance Infrastructure
To judge the ultimate immaturity of the “Cloud” ERP/Finance solution market, look no further than the broad success of vendors offering MDM (Master Data Management) solutions. Ironically, one of the perennial leaders in the space is one of the biggest purveyors of “you only need one” ERP/Finance solutions talking out the other side of their mouth—the 800-pound gorilla that is SAP—calling into constant question whether there can ever be a single, central solution to any company’s ERP/Finance needs. This actually makes perfect sense: Even within a unicorn single-instance ERP/Finance implementation, there will always be utility in matching incoming and outcoming transactions/messages to the proverbial “Golden Record”—to/from suppliers and customers who so often represent the true source of the information contained therein. (How many times has your bank/supplier/customer changed location addresses, contact names, phone numbers, etc., even before you reorganized cost centers, budget codes, or part/resource/asset numbers?)
Connect Speaker Spotlight: Analyst Brent Skinner Talks Concrete & Abstract HR
When isolved surveyed 500 HR leaders earlier this year, 92 percent said that employee experience (EX) is a top priority for them in 2021. After all, investing in the communications and capabilities (often digital) that an employee has with their employer before, during and after their tenure can’t be wrong, right?
With EX going beyond core HR functions – like reducing payroll errors and improving compliance – there’s often a disconnect between what leaders want – grow their employer brand, engage their employees better – and how to lobby to get investment for it.
#HRTechChat’s:
For our latest episode of #HRTechChat, my guest was Theresa Harkins-Schulz, senior vice president of customer experience at Inspirus. And this is where our conversation began, with Theresa’s sharing of her philosophy around the customer journey. Because of its customer-centered connotations, she prefers the term customer experience over customer success and other monikers denoting the realm of activities organizations carry out in tending to their customers.
From there, our discussion expanded to ponder comparisons between the customer experience and the employee experience and to what extent organizations can approach both similarly, look at them through the same lens, or even coordinate their efforts. A member of the 3Sixty Insights Global Executive Advisory Council and long-time board member (and past president and past education chair) for Recognition Professionals International, Theresa has trained her focus on the art and practice of employee recognition for much of her career — several years ago designing an employee recognition program for Delta Airlines.
3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat with David Barak, Chief Marketing Officer of CloudPay
For the latest episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat video podcast, my guest was David Barak, chief marketing officer of CloudPay. Through a unified cloud platform, CloudPay provides managed global payroll in more than 130 countries. The company also offers treasury services across this geographic footprint. Here’s a sampling of the ideas we covered:
Virtually no employer ever really, truly plans for global payroll in advance. At some point, most organizations that get large enough and global enough get to a place where their company-wide payroll is practically unmanageable. This becomes the official outset of a typically three-stage process that eventually gets them to a straightforward scenario wherein their global payroll is under control and working for, not against, them. The journey there is almost always backward. You’ll have to watch the video to learn what these stages are.
For this, the latest episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat, Core-Mark International Senior Director of Human Resources Ahmad Noordin joined us. Responsible specifically for systems, payroll and people analytics at Core-Mark, Amhad is also a member of our Global Executive Advisory Council. During our chat, he and I discussed the many factors employers must consider when attempting to bring order to critical aspects of human capital management at a geographically dispersed, decentralized organization. A Fortune 250 company, Core-Mark is one such entity, a behind-the-scenes supplier to thousands of convenience stores across North America.
When thinking about centralizing certain HCM functions at an organization that services a broad geographic footprint and possesses a commensurate physical presence to accommodate this, Noordin says it’s important to understand that balance is critical. Satellite offices bring much to the table in terms of boots-on-the-ground intelligence on what works, and what doesn’t. At the same time, the HR department absolutely needs deep visibility into activity such as, for example, compensation planning — whose UKG module Noordin and his team are presently implementing. And, workforce-related compliance overall must hew centrally lest the organization lose control of it entirely — and suffer the risk.
3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat with Jennifer Ravalli, Head of Marketing at PandoLogic
Jennifer Ravalli was our guest for the latest episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat podcast. Following long stints at ADP and, most recently, iCIMS, Jenn joined PandoLogic in September 2020 to head all marketing efforts.
Jenn and I met and first spoke at the Spring 2021 HR Technology Conference & Exposition. It’s when we delved specifically into PandoLogic’s solution, a programmatic job advertising platform with underpinnings in artificial intelligence and available on the iCIMS marketplace.
Naturally, this episode of #HRTechChat covers much ground in the areas of AI, the future of work, and more — among our favorite topics at 3Sixty Insights. (Go here and here for our blogging on these ideas.)
Jenn sees AI transforming the roles of recruiting (and sourcing, for that matter). Drawing on lessons learned from the analysis of massive data sets, AI will eventually become just plain better than even the most seasoned, savvy, innovative professionals at certain things in recruiting and sourcing.