One of the key requirements identified for your organization’s new HCM solution may be the capability to manage the various reporting structures and hierarchy among your company’s organizational and business units.
Checklist of HCM requirements for accommodating your organizational structure
As you weigh the various HCM solutions available, probe into their capability and determine their strength to meet your current and future requirements as your organization grows:
- Management Reporting Structure: Does the HCM solution provide flexibility to accommodate both the traditional and unique management reporting structures within your organization? Does the solution allow for variations of reporting structure requirements that may include person-to-person, group-to-person, person-to-position, group-to-position assignments, or dotted-line relationships to name several examples.
- Reporting tools to visualize organization structure: Do the reporting tools within the HCM solution support the creation of organizational charts to illustrate your reporting structures, and are these charts generated using the vendor’s reporting tools to produce these charts directly from within the application
- Assigning Tasks: Does the HCM solution allow you to efficiently assign (individually or through a mass update) your organizational units to the employee records such as the company, region, division, location, department, position and cost centres?
- Flexible to new configurations: To what extent is the HCM solution configurable in allowing you to automate the assignment of these units to the employee record within either a new hire or reorganization workflow process. What level of validation and business rules are supported within the organizational unit assignment, and how flexible is the HCM solution to accommodate any exceptions or overrides to the rules?
Challenges in accommodating organizational structures
Several key challenges within many companies, relative to accommodating organizational structure with in their HCM solutions, often include:
- Inconsistent use of position titles across segments of the organization, with variations among systems and spreadsheets, requiring continuous monitoring of information for accuracy.
- Incomplete flow of data from the position set up, and the assigned organizational attributes, to the employee records within the HCM Solution.
- Lack of accessibility to historical records related to organizational assignments due to limitations of the reporting tools or the structure of the HCM system itself.
- Manual preparation of headcount reports, based on organizational groupings, which are difficult to prepare based on a specific point-in-time that may be required.
A flexible HCM solution can help
With respect to these challenges, several key opportunities through the use of a comprehensive and unified HCM solution may include:
Adopting the use of standardized and consistent position title assignments, and the provision of alternate titles if required, to support the analysis and reporting across the organization.
- Using a flexible and dynamic solution to support position assignment requirements with configurable setups that include associated and relational codes for organizational detail tracking.
- Capturing historical position-related data, to support point-in-time analysis of position title assignments, provide employee turnover and headcount reporting, and support the analysis of employee population activity within a unified solution.
- Supporting a consistent and organized position and organizational structure within the HCM Solution as a foundation to support other key operational areas of your business including system integration.
- Leveraging a unified and flexible HCM solution which meets your company’s organizational structure requirements, without the need for workarounds and substitutions, to fully accommodate your evolving and unique requirements.
Ensure that your new HCM solution fully supports the structure within your organization and doesn’t pose restrictions on the methods by which you need to group your records and accurately capture the information to illustrate the true organizational ‘picture’ of your business.
If your HCM solution cannot provide the flexibility to change with your organization and how you do work then it might be time for an upgrade !
