Chinese to English Translated Article from National Business Daily Dated January 31, 2012 Original article
“Generally Speaking, companies will cut and control their costs first from HRO,” said Tang Wenqin, founder of the China Financial Elite Club.
As Tang Wenqin expected, through lower costs, improve efficiency, enhance the competitiveness of enterprises is becoming the focus for contemporary global business. Among them, the transformation of human resources management draws most attention.
Deloitte Consulting has released the "2011 Human Resources Trends": "Cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) is an inevitable trend for human resource management this year." Right now, the cloud-based human resources management is considered as the most effective way to help enterprises achieve business transformation as ERP did. (EnterpriseResourcePlanning enterprise resource planning system)
"Could-based HR (human resources) takes the advantages of low input costs, and can be centrally managed, which helps companies reduce costs on IT cost relating HR, to better predict and control the data and processing such as monthly staff wages, etc, and solve the business problems across the unified management of the region,"said Wang Wei, CEO of CDP Group China, the HR outsourcing service provider.
"In fact, cloud computing is just an innovative performance of software services, and it already exists in our daily lives, for example, we use the network mailbox from major portal for free, and we do not install the software on our computers , but use it whenever we want," said Martin Judge, the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of The Judge Group, Inc. and its subsidiaries. Recently, Judge China, in partnership with IQNavigator is officially launching a new Vendor Management System (VMS) and Managed Services solution, named ‘Judge China Powered by IQN’.“As for the enterprises, in the past they built a "generator" within the company and bought servers and software, which took a lot of manpower and material resources. In the past decade, there have been many suppliers provide similar services, which help cloud computing developed gradually,” Martin Judge said.
"Some payroll system and personnel management systems developed by some software companies can help customers with daily personnel management by cloud computing. Customers do not need buy equipment and software and they can use this management system as long as they have access to Internet. "Martin Judge added.
"Now cloud computing can help avoiding the initial investment on manpower and finance, and enterprises (especially SMEs) can pay according to usage, which allows more companies manage to afford with the most advanced management software of HR management,” said Feng Zhaohui, the vice president and CEO of ADP Information Technology China, “Cloud computing does not require IT department and save operation and maintenance costs. The cloud human resource management takes another major advantage of centralized management by the software supplier, which is more efficient; energy-saving, more green and environmentally friendly.”
The increasing pressure of rising costs may be one of the most important reason that cloud-based human resource management has gained more and more concern.
Under the circumstances that China has reached the "Lewis turning point" which implied the cost of labor is increasing by 15% to 20% every year, it is believed that only some of the most advanced labor management solutions can help enterprises to improve management efficienncy and control costs.
Senior human resource management expert, Ms. Chen Juanran told journalist that with the growing cost of labor and materials, "migration" can be very dangerous. As a result, we can add value through improving the efficiency of human resource management to release a higher labor efficiency.
In act, the huge space of improvement in Chinese labor efficiency has always been the main breakthrough through which enterprises can control their costs effectively and that' s why cloud-based human resource management is becoming more and more popular.
"Once the effective utilization increases by 2.2%, the whole labor productivity will improve by 3.2% when the number of employees, job skills and quality of work remains unchanged." said David Mitchell, the general manager of labor management solutions provider, Kronos in Great China.
In Mitchell's point, proper tools in overall labor management can help companies to confirm the human efficiency variables which is not in daily management, evaluate or analyze the non-value-added factor and optimize or improve the efficiency of labor to enhance the efficiency and output.
As for human resource service in the cloud performance, Li Haiyan, the sales director of ADP in China thought that from the view of a HR, existing technology can already achieve a unified platform for real-time communication between HR and other business and focus on the whole process of human resource management which covers like recruitment, training, performance,payroll,benefits adminisitration or other HR applications etc..
Though cloud services in overseas business has already been widely used, it is still a new thing to the domestic enterprise and has been seldom used due to its management philosophy issues rather than costs.
"It' s very sensitive when talking about human resources management for most domestic enterprises who want to take everything under control" said Ms. Chen Juanran who thingks that the biggest difference in management phoilosophy about cloud human resouces management is security," Previously people would feel unsafe for HR cloud services, but in fact, it will be more safety and classified to leave the basic personnel information to a third management. In foreign countries, a enterprise which has already come to a certain stage of development will choose to focus on the things which they are most good at and give the daliy work and repetitve tasks to a third company to complete."
In Chen' s view, the department will not reflect its value if too much times are used in daily affairs.
In addition, another pain in technological innovation has also reflected on the cloud human resouces management. Although highly developed IT products enable enterprises' management to become simple, convenient and efficient, but on the other hand, it also make people rely on IT and Internet products which make the original management come to a fission. For an example, the occurence of mobile phones and the Internet highly reduces the communication ability of people while face-to-face communications can enhance the emotional communication between people and people.
In this regard, Mr. Feng Zhaohui also believes that it is indeed one of the challenges which is an unavoidable reality to business. So facing is better than avoidance.