Things to do after you have chosen your human resource system

Here are three things that you need to do after you have chosen the human resource system software for your business.

Number one: Cleanse
The first thing that you need to do is to cleanse your data.

Almost every organization that is switching software is going to need to cleanse out their old data that was stored electronically, the only expectation to this is businesses that are just getting started. Most business simply wants to transfer all of the old employee data into the new system so that they can get up and running as soon as possible. You want to avoid doing this because it can be a costly mistake. Before going live with your new system, you want to look at the integrity of the employee data that you are transferring over. Ask yourself if the information is accurate, you also want to make sure you delete any redundant information, such as department names. Cleaning out the data before you manually enter it into the new system does not take as long as you think and saves you from overloading the system with useless data.

Number two: Evaluate
One thing that many businesses are tempted to do is to customize their new human resource system to do everything the same way their old system worked; this is something that you want to avoid doing. Another thing that businesses tend to do is store too much information, not all information needs to be stored so think over what you plan to store before storing it. You only need to store the information that is required by law, but you also want to store any information that you use to measure or report on. When you are customizing your system you want to think first about the return on investment before you proceed, is the customization going to benefit your business or will it prevent your business from growing. For example, if you are told it is going to cost you $4,000 to make the program customized you want to ensure that you will be getting $4,000 worth of increased efficiency.

Number three: Measure
Once you have implemented your human resource system you want to make sure you are measuring three factors that are considered critical. Something to think about is that most of the time just measuring these three factors is not enough so you will want to make sure you are tracking and comparing your findings on a regular basis. You can also correlate your findings with data that is not related to human resources so you get the best possible results.

One factor that you need to be tracking is the headcount. Many companies only deal with the headcount once a year, but it should be something that you are doing on a monthly basis. You want to track the headcount and correlate it with other information, such as production volume so you can see how the headcount is affecting your business overall.

You will also need to measure your employee turnover, which careful monitoring of your turnover can help you decrease your costs. With turnover, you don't want to just track the general numbers you also want to track specific data for each employee so that you can see what types of patterns are starting to develop. You also want to correlate turnover information with other human resources information that is gathered from exit interviews so you can effectively reduce costs.

The last critical factor you need to measure is your cost per employee so you can effectively reduce your costs. You want to see how much money each employee is costing your human resources department. What you want to look out for is any self-service functions that you can use in your business to help reduce the burden your human resources department is facing.