Another human capital management solution seems to hit the market every moment. This makes choosing the right HCM vendor increasingly important—and difficult.
By 2025, Gartner projects that 60% of global midmarket and large enterprises will have chosen a cloud-based HCM suite for talent management and administrative HR while outsourcing their remaining HCM requirements through other solutions. Common HCM functions include recruitment, retention, workforce management, and HR service.
Delivering the right HR roadmap for your organization’s needs and choosing the right solutions are essential for maximizing your return on investment in HCM technology. Align your HCM technology with your organizational objectives through your vendor selection process.
1) Your HCM systems should meet your needs.
The success of your HCM project and your eventual ROI depend on how much you will benefit now and in the future. Do not rely on people who have picked the wrong technology for your organization before or simply replicate systems that other companies have used in the past. Just as what has not worked for you previously will not work now, nor will what has worked for others not necessarily work for you.
Do not rely on any one decision-maker, vendor, or solution either. Maximizing the value of your HCM solution begins with involving the right people in your selection process, identifying your organization’s needs, and aligning technology with your workflows.
Consider hiring vendor-agnostic consultants that would involve stakeholders throughout your organization in candid discussions about your company’s biggest opportunities and challenges. A strong start to your HCM vendor selection process could include a facilitated strategic planning discussion focused on your organization’s mission, situation, and desired future state. You could also define and document your organizational objectives and project goals so that you can communicate them to vendors more clearly.
2) You should use the best solutions.
Once you identify your needs, finding the solution that meets them best and that helps you most becomes the next step in choosing an HCM system. Apply the same rigorous criteria to all potential vendors, whether they provide on-premises or cloud software or offer a stand-alone solution or suite. Assess your industry as well as your current and future needs.
If all the solutions you consider look similar and work similarly, you must dig deeper to determine which vendor would be best at re-imagining how your organization could function and helping you to bring that bold future to fruition.
When reviewing vendor responses to your requests for information or proposals, consider their future development plans as well as their past success in fulfilling roadmap promises to evaluate their ability to support you in pursuing your long-term goals. Prepare concise summaries of each demonstration also so that you can evaluate solutions consistently.
3) You should maximize your return on investment (ROI).
Though evaluating features and benefits is important, choosing an HCM vendor is about more than comparing technology. It is about establishing a relationship.
You must trust that your HCM vendor will perform as desired and as expected, and would resolve any discrepancies in either. Therefore, many HCM users attach value to service experience, conflict resolution, and strategy and innovation. Tools like customer reviews and satisfaction scores or the experiences of vendor-agnostic consultants can help you evaluate a prospective partner as a potential fit with your organization.
Also, look for vendor-selection red flags like a lack of a clear implementation process. If a vendor does not have proven procedures for implementing their systems, then you probably would not get the ROI that you expected. User adoption would likely fall short of your targets and the efficiencies that you had sought would probably not materialize, at least not to the level that you anticipated.
Choosing an HCM vendor can be difficult. But the success of your HCM project and its eventual ROI depend on your choice. Pick correctly by focusing your vendor selection process on your needs and a potential solution’s ability to meet them successfully.
Learn how HCM consultants from Providence Technology Solutions can help you develop precisely the right HR roadmap for your unique needs and ensure maximum value through our Vendor Selection Services.
Contact us today to discuss your vendor selection needs online, by email at info@theptsteam.com or by calling 904.719.8264.
