Businesses tend to have more in common than meets the eye. However different they may appear, and however diverse their different products and services may seem on the surface, there are some fundamental back-office functions that all organizations rely on. HR, payroll, IT, accounts and administration are the inescapable reality of doing business on any scale.
Those realities can quickly build up a level of complexity that can be resource intensive and – at worst – impose a brake on the commercial thrust of the business itself. Those back-office functions matter: no one works well carrying a dead weight.
Offering a way for business to slip out from under that burden, cloud based HR management sounds too good to be true. A one-size-fits-all package that integrates the full range of personnel data, recruitment, training, authentications and management at the touch of a button is the HR manager’s dream. But it is a dream coming true. If the move from paper-based administration to electronic data storage took some time to get used to, the move to the cloud is happening almost overnight.
From the point of view of any business the ease of access, data storage, management and security that professional providers such as Cezanne HR software deliver represents a significant streamlining. Typically, those functions that sit under the heading of HR evolve along different paths and develop their own task specific peculiarities. That may be unproblematic on a task-specific basis, but when they need to be integrated – for performance management, for example – the lack of synthesis can be painfully evident.
Aside from the day-to-day efficiencies that a cloud-based system offers (e.g. recruitment management, secure data storage) by taking the step to move to an integrated provider a business automatically brings its different administrative regimes into line. That is particularly useful for organizations that span national and language boundaries.
Regional offices can all-too-easily develop their own modus operandi. Sharing a single consolidated platform makes for a more concerted and a more flexible organizational management infrastructure. At a time when recruitment – most evidently – has become internationalised this is not insignificant.
A further advantage offered by cloud based systems is that they are effectively future-proofed. Rather than the static, contractual fixity that marked the early phase of digital HR – where software was largely customised to branded IT hardware – any updates are supplied to the business as part of the service, rather than being offered to them for sale on a need-to-purchase basis. For example, Cezanne HR make a point of selling their products on the basis that future upgrades are supplied as part of the initial contract agreement. As existing technologies inevitably age and get to the point of upgrade, moving to the cloud is increasingly seen as a natural move.
All of these benefits, ultimately, impact on the competitiveness of any business. As organizations such as Easy Jet and Aviva have already demonstrated, moving HR to the cloud can make a significant impact on the bottom line.
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