Why You Should Consolidate Your HR Technology Stack
The rise of the highly specialised HR tech market has led a large number of organisations to work with a multitude of HR solutions to carry their day-to-day workforce management and strategy planning.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make when choosing their HR suite vendor is that they omit to account for scalability in their list of selection criteria. The result? They end up spending too much for too little functionality and with more software than they need to compensate an initial solution that was originally unadapted.
That’s when you realise it might be time to consolidate your HR technology portfolio. The process, generally referred to as vendor consolidation, can appear quite complex to approach at first. Which solution do you no longer need? Is my employee data going to be lost? How do we find a solution adapted to our needs? People generally prefer to stick to the known but the benefits of switching to a more suited and complete HR solution far outweighs the potential risk and troubles.
If you’re thinking about consolidating your HR technology portfolio, these six benefits will help you build the case to switch to a more appropriate, all-in-one HR solution.
6 Benefits of Vendor Consolidation for HR
Easier to manage vendor relationships
Working with a single vendor means less relationships to manage. When you manage less relationships, you can spend more time working on other important tasks and projects. Rationalising your HR tech portfolio can thus help your create a more productive team. Instead of having to negotiate with several providers, you can unlock more value by focusing your efforts on a single one. This way you have the opportunity to transform the standard customer/vendor relationship into an actual partnership.
Need less variety of skills to master the HR tech portfolio
Companies quite often underestimate the expertise and knowledge required to operate the HR tech systems they have invested in. This means that they fail to reap the benefits of their investment and miss on the capabilities of their HR systems because no one within the business is simply trained enough to know all of the ins and outs of the multiple software applications in place. Now if you make the shift to a single platform, you have the opportunity to train your people thoroughly on that one platform. One platform used by many vs. multiple platforms used by a few also means more collaboration, which in turn drastically improves service quality and efficiency. Knowledge and best-practises can be transferred across users more easily. In the end you need less skills and less people to manage a single platform.
Receive better support
When you focus your HR investment into one complete HR solution, you can receive better support simply because all of your issues can be centralised, managed and answered at the same time. Rather than having to contact multiple account managers (one per software) to solve your issues, you can turn yourself toward a single source of support for all your troubles. And with better vendor relationships, the customer support can be personalised and turned into real customer success!
Greater operability and integration between solutions
When companies add to their HR tech toolkit, they might overlook the level of interoperability between the systems they bring onboard. Processes might end up being compromised, creating more issues in the end. Also, the functionalities of a new system might sometimes overlap with the functionalities of an existing system, meaning your are basically paying twice for the same features.
Operations become truly seamless when your HR activities can be controlled via a single platform. A complete solution like EmployeeConnect ensures that your HR modules integrate perfectly with each other. In return, access to data is facilitated and made more transparent.
Reduce HR tech costs
One of the major benefits of HR tech vendor consolidation is certainly financial in nature. The numbers can add up pretty quickly when you use separate applications to manage fundamental HR activities such as recruitment, onboarding or employee performance just to cite a few. Essentially, using an end-to-end HR solution saves you money because its price is likely to be much lower than the overall cost of your current stack of applications combined.
While some of your current vendors might be charging you on a yearly basis, some others might do so on a monthly basis and some others based on the number of live active users. That sounds like some serious headache by adding to the overall billing complexity. Paying and reconciling invoices will be made easier when you have to deal with a single vendor and you’ll know exactly what you’re paying for.
Drive consistent user experience
By reducing the number of software applications you use internally to a few or simply just one, you can dramatically improve the user experience. The concept is pretty simple yet critical to optimise usage and encourage technology adoption.
Simplifying the user experience using a single platform can actually reduce the cognitive strain and create a snappier experience for the end user. We know well the reluctance people can have to learn new things, especially when it comes to mastering new technology. The process of learning how to use multiple solutions can be tedious and time consuming. When you offer the same level of service through a unique and consistent user interface, you gain in productivity and save on training time and investment.
It also makes it easier for your to establish standards and conventions. For example, different applications could be using different words to refer to the same thing. One application could refer to employee development as “training” and another one as “learning”. This language simplification also makes your work faster by creating a more efficient communication internally.
Obviously, vendor consolidation is an issue that can be eliminated from the start by following a thorough functional requirement assessment of your business needs before jumping in with a new vendor. Choosing the right HR system for your organisation requires a holistic approach and the involvement of all stakeholders in order to pick a solution that is effective and durable. The main challenge when consolidating vendors is to find one that will offer all the solutions within one product.
If you think you are paying too much for your HR tech stack or have too many systems in place, we’d love to introduce you to EmployeeConnect HRIS. A complete and integrated HR solution to manage your workforce and create a better workplace.
