What are the challenges of an HRIS project for a company?

The stakes of an HRIS project are particularly high for a company. The Human Resources information system will indeed have an impact on all employees. Talent management tools are used in all areas of the company, from Human Resources to Payroll, including time management and skills management. Implementing an HRIS tool therefore requires taking many factors into account.

HRIS acquisition

Equipping the company with an HRIS solution involves carrying out a detailed audit beforehand and drawing up the most complete specifications possible. All HR processes must be analyzed in order to clearly identify the company’s present and future needs. We must anticipate the problems that the HRIS tool will have to address in the years to come. Flexibility and scalability are important criteria for the chosen solution.

The project team must be aware of the challenges of an HRIS project. Payroll management, Human Resources management and more generally all administrative management will depend on the tool implemented. The team in charge of project management will therefore need to be both highly rigorous in meeting needs, deadlines and costs, and sufficiently flexible to adapt to user requirements.

The challenge of an HRIS project is therefore to choose the best solution at a given time, one that best meets the specifications and can evolve quickly when the HR team identifies new needs, when there are regulatory changes or new users to integrate. Within the framework of a larger company or a group, the project team will also have to integrate the constraints inherent to each country (legislation, management rules, language, currency…). Since the volume of data processed is significant, it will be necessary to decide what can be deployed locally and what will require more centralized management.

HRISintegration

The HRIS tool must be integrated into the company’s overall information system. The project team will have to harmonize statutes, practices and rules (particularly in Europe with the GDPR) as well as data exchange formats.

In a group or when companies merge, it may be necessary to have several management tools working together. It will then be necessary to succeed in making them communicate with each other, which can be complex in the case of proprietary data formats for example. When this is not possible or too difficult to implement, it is better to opt for a complete change of the HRIS with the implementation of a new common tool.

Migration of an HRIS

If you choose a solution that is not provided in “SaaS” mode, one aspect that should not be overlooked is the ability of an HRIS tool to migrate, generally to a more recent version of the software. This is a crucial issue from the point of view of the tool’s operational maintenance.

It is important to perform updates and upgrades as regularly as possible. This ensures that the HRIS complies with the various regulations and helps to optimize maintenance costs. It’s always easier to move from one minor version to another, or from one minor version to the next major version, rather than having to update several versions at once, with the risk of regression.

When the existing HRIS is obsolete, it is necessary to consider either migrating to a recent version or replacing it. The objective is to eventually obtain a homogeneous set of tools for the entire company and to avoid increasing the complexity of the system by piling up various software and versions. Interventions to modernize the HRIS must be regular and planned, in order to organize data management as well as possible, reduce maintenance costs and facilitate change management.