Take talent management to the next level with this integrated approach

By Edward Vesely

Conventional business thinking puts a company’s workforce on the right side of the balance sheet; salaries, benefits, and other compensation turn them into a dominant liability.

Now we’re seeing a significant shift in how an employee’s value—individually, and as part of their workforce—is assessed, thanks to a more modern concept of human capital. From this new vantage point, the education, experience, skills, and proficiencies that workers offer put them on the opposite side of the balance sheet. People are now perceived as assets, and those assets are a powerful predictor of a company’s success.

However, establishing workers as human capital or, better yet, talent demands more than a team photo on a capabilities brochure or a pat on the back in an annual review. Talent needs to exist in parallel with traditional asset categories—and in the future, the two may very well be indistinguishable.

From Human Resources to Human Capital
Human capital management (HCM) presents a new set of challenges: How can we gauge workforce availability and capability? How can we recognize challenges and gaps, and then drive the right solutions to address them? HCM deserves a bigger role in enterprise resource planning (ERP). But what does that look like?

This is what SilkRoad, global provider of talent management software, and NetSuite set out to answer. The two took on the challenge of providing organizations with an integrated cloud-based solution that didn’t leave talent management as an afterthought, but instead provided HR professionals with a cross-organizational perspective and a greater capacity for finding, fostering, advancing, and promoting talent.

An Integrated, Automated Approach
Integration of human resources functions such as recruiting, onboarding, and performance management as well as HR-external functions such as ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) has become a high-performance essential.

However, many organizations are still operating with an assortment of software running out of numerous databases—never in sync, never “speaking” to one another. By providing each department with shared access to real-time data from a single source, strategic analysis and planning become more agile and accurate, and corporate silos dissolve.

NetSuite’s and SilkRoad’s shared advocacy for cloud-based computing hinges on access, portability, and flexibility. This is where opportunity awaits organizations of every size. With automated and integrated solutions delivered in the cloud, IT involvement is minimized, allowing for rapid deployment, ease of use, decrease in administrative and transactional activity, and significant cost savings.

Through the development of the new Life Suite® SuiteApp, SilkRoad and NetSuite provide a silo-busting integration between ERP and cloud-based talent management, including talent acquisition, talent development, and core HRMS—all delivered through a talent portal. Still in its infancy with only 46 percent of companies reporting a fully or partially cloud-based human resource management system (HRMS), the benefits of an integrated, automated solution—a clearer and more actionable perspective of talent resources, needs, and potential—are significant.

Workforce Analytics: Moving Beyond Resources and Costs, and into Talent Management
Through integration of HCM and ERP functions, companies can access information about human capital on a micro/macro level: say, the employment, performance, and compensation history and status of a particular individual, or dig deeper into big-picture insights about their organizational structure, practices, and trends.

This level of access makes it possible to plan and react with agility. For instance, after a sales team has a training session, the integration reveals a clear line of vision from that session to actual post-training sales results. During onboarding, all the different processes and actions are now linked and scheduled seamlessly, offering a better experience for all involved.

Users can also gain insight into overall HR trends such as department turnover, average duration of employment, revenue by different groups, and cross-sections alongside salary activity, performance trends, employee life cycle, and much more. Now leaders can take smarter action to encourage positive trends (and remedy negative ones), maintain a focus on shared goals, and predict the success of plans and initiatives.

Robust analytics enable users to monitor key performance indicators such as revenue per employee, timeto-hire, quality of hire, and HR cost by employee, and then tie them back to the company’s overall business results. With the right numbers in hand, smart pivots in a more targeted direction become possible.

Talent management integration gives employers tools to align their workforce and employees tools to drive their own careers. They can access resources for development, performance tracking, goal setting, career planning—all with the perspective and motivation provided by information, access, and empowerment.

Topaz Shared Services: Improving People Processes through Business and HR Alignment
Topaz Shared Services, formed by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City in response to impending market changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act, increased competition and the need to offer consumers new options is ahead of the curve in demonstrating how these trends can work in an enterprise. After consultation with Nuage Consulting Group, a NetSuite Solution Provider and a SilkRoad Reselling Partner, the NetSuite customer made the move to implement the Life Suite SuiteApp. With a small HR department, the high-growth startup stands to benefit from this forward-thinking decision to automate and integrate all HR processes with ERP. After the three-month implementation is complete, the integration will streamline processes across every step of the employee lifecycle.

Automated employee administration, payroll, training, and compliance reporting will make HR more functional. By eliminating the need for management of transactional processes—tracking in spreadsheets, pushing procedures from point A to B—Topaz Shared Services will be able to think more strategically about its talent-related operations. Integrated talent management tools will give the company the capacity to make more informed, evaluative hiring decisions, and to cultivate skills development and goal setting post-onboarding. Other startups or mid-sized companies running lean should take notes.

Strengthening the Capacity and Function of HR and Empowering Employees and Leaders
HR professionals strive to deliver the person with the right skills to the right role at the right time and to build on that success by creating an environment that provides talent with empowerment and development.

HCM-ERP integration gives employees a clear path to achieving their aims, and actionable insight on how they can contribute to the success of the entire enterprise. They can choose a path that motivates, inspires, and fulfills them—and helps them contribute to a dynamic workplace culture that fosters loyalty.

On a broader level, businesses can access a holistic view of their workplace and gain insight into future needs through a closed-loop planning process. By incorporating talent management as a pillar of ERP through an integrated approach, HR is relieved of its transactional processes and upleveled as a strategic endeavor.

NetSuite and SilkRoad are revolutionizing how HR happens and ensuring that human capital becomes a company’s most powerful asset.

To learn more, view their webinar here.

About Author

Ed Vesely is Chief Marketing Officer at SilkRoad. SilkRoad, a NetSuite partner, is a leading global provider of cloud-based, end-toend HR solutions that enable customers to find, attract, develop, and retain the best talent.

The statements and opinions herein are those of SilkRoad and not of NetSuite. NetSuite has not verified any statements or claims herein and assumes no responsibility for such statements or claims.