Best way to master any HCM software in just few days

Human Capital Management is a practice for organizations to manage the recruitment, employment and development of company's employees through ERP software's and every company be it small or big follows this practice.This creates ample opportunities both for experienced processionals and freshers seeking career in this domain.

This also creates perfect breeding ground for ERP vendors to develop HCM softwares competing each other to offer best in class technologies and this has resulted into hundreds of HCM softwares currently in the market and they keep coming much more often than ever before. With so many software products in the market, one really finds it very difficult to decide which one to choose and make the career in it hence wandering off the real goal which is to master the domain.

This is simply because people focus too much on the particular software they are working or interested to work instead of looking at the big picture. One can't really learn to work on all of the HCM softwares.

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In my opinion, the best way to master the HCM domain is to focus on learning the domain directly rather than through the ERP Softwares such as ADP, KRONOS, PeopleSoft, Oracle Fusion, Successfactors etc... Lets break it down to simplify more.

HCM domain consists of following components:

Core HR which consists of

• Recruitment 
• Workforce Administration
• Performance Management
• Career and Succession Planning
• Compensation Management

Benefits Administration
Time and Labor
Absence/Leave Management
Payroll

Each component represents a business process. For instance, Core HR is for entire workforce administration from hire to exit while Time and Labor is for time management. The core structure of these business processes remain same across countries but some of these such as Payroll  have some country specific elements driven by legislative laws of the particular country. While others such as Performance Management remain same across countries but may differ from one company to another.

Now that you have a bird eye view of the individual business processes under HCM suit, the next thing to do is dissect each one of them and understand their life-cycle which will give you a very clear picture as to how they would be configured in any product. Once we master these processes, it's a matter of just figuring out how they would be facilitated in any HCM software. Most people think that the software drive the business process but it's rather other way around.

Not clear enough ..?  Lets understand with an example.

Consider you want to learn Benefits Administration and have very limited time for it. Lets break it down how you should do it.

Dissect the business process

Benefits Administration process consists of following elements:

• Plan Types ( Health, Life, Disability, Saving, Retirement etc...)
• Plans (Dental, Vision, Basic Life, Suppl Life, LTD, STD, 401(k), Pension etc...)
• Benefit Providers (Companies like United Health Group, Religare, ICICI Prudential etc...)
• Coverage Amount and it's Calculation formula
• Premium Rates (Paid by Employee and/or Employer) and its calculation formula
• Life Events
• Enrollment Life-cycle

Study each element 

We need to study each element in details and draw a picture as to how they are related to each other
For instance, Life Events is when an employee's family status changes due to an event of marriage or birth of a child. When this occurs, the employee needs to inform their employer about this and upgrade their health coverage to include the new dependent. While reporting the Life Event, employee needs to provide all the details pertaining to the event. The type of details depend on nature of event such as birth or marriage.

How it works in the HCM Software

Now turn to your HCM software and figure out how the business process and it's elements are configured. If a particular HCM software supports the particular business process such as Benefit Administration then it would definitely facilitate the configuration of it. How it does can vary from one software to another. For Instance - PeopleSoft may have multiple pages to setup different elements of business process whereas Workday might have just one to setup all and it really doesn't matter as long as one knows how to do it.
Suppose you have to setup a health plan in the system. The first thing to do is gather all the information about the plan such as, eligibility, coverage and premium calculation, vendor details etc. Then just figure out how all of this will be configured in the system. You need to follow the same strategy for all other modules.

Related Articles:

How COBRA Act works in US

How Self Service Works in Time and Leave Management (TLM)

Recruitment Process Life Cycle

How Affordable Care Act (ACA) Work

PeopleSoft Time and Labor Setup Architecture