Summary
Episode 8: In this episode of the FourthSquare Solutions Podcast, Kerry Boudreaux and Srijib Chatterjee explore the intricacies of Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM). They discuss the comprehensive nature of HCM, the evolution of Oracle HCM Cloud, and the challenges faced during implementations. Srijib shares insights on the importance of data quality, the complexities of payroll, and the necessity of a phased approach to implementation. The conversation emphasizes the significance of customer readiness and effective change management to ensure the successful adoption of HCM solutions.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome and Guest Introduction
02:40 Introduction to Human Capital Management
05:32 The Evolution of Oracle HCM
08:40 Challenges in HCM Implementations
14:30 Implementation Strategies and Best Practices
21:08 Ensuring Successful Adoption of HCM Solutions
26:03 Conclusion
Welcome and Guest Introduction
Kerry Boudreaux
Hi, and welcome again to the FourthSquare Solutions Podcast. My name’s Kerry Boudreaux and I’m Senior Vice President of Sales here at FourthSquare. Today, we are going to be talking about human capital management, HCM. And I couldn’t be more excited than having my dear friend, Sri Chatterjee. Sri, welcome to the podcast.
Srijib Chatterjee
Hello, everybody. Hi, my name is Srijib Chatterjee, and I am the Director of HCM Cloud for FourthSquare, and I’m here to talk about human capital management today.
Kerry Boudreaux
Absolutely. So thank you, Sri. When I started this podcast, one of the things that I wanted to do for the audience is to bring this strong knowledge that we have at FourthSquare to the table, introduce you to these folks so they can share some of their experiences and some of their knowledge with you. And I’m doing that today. Sri has close to 20 years of experience implementing Oracle HCM solutions, right, Sri?
Srijib Chatterjee
That’s right. So I have more than 20 years of experience in the hire to retire cycle. I have seen, you know, everything. My entire career is dedicated to HCM and I have experience across different industries, starting from financial services, healthcare, and for the last few years have been dedicated to the public sector.
I have worked on city, county projects, K to 12 and so on. And from a global perspective, again, I’ve implemented HCM solutions for customers throughout the globe, in the Middle East, in Europe, several implementations in US and also in the APAC region. I’m pretty excited here to talk about the human capital management and what we are doing in FourthSquare for different customers here.
Introduction to Human Capital Management
Kerry Boudreaux
So let’s dive right into it Sri. For the audience, what exactly is human capital management, HCM? Some people call it, know, human resource information system, HRIF. But what is HCM? What all areas does it expand to?
Srijib Chatterjee
Sure, Kerry. So human capital management, as you correctly mentioned, is a set of technologies, tools for different organizations to manage their employees. And it spans across different modules or processes, as you call it, right from recruiting or talent acquisition. Then it moves into a global system of records, where you maintain and manage the records and the data for the employees.
Then you move on to processes such as payroll, benefits, time and attendance, health and safety, talent management and training. So this is the entire gamut of the different processes which we have within HCM. And Oracle HCM Cloud, I would say, is one of the best products in the market, which has this entire range of products. It’s just not focused on one specific module or process. Implementing Oracle HCM Cloud, would probably get all of these different modules or processes under one umbrella, which is Oracle Cloud.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah. So, Oracle HCM, includes what we call hiring to retiring, correct?
Srijib Chatterjee
That’s right. It’s called the hire to retire cycle because you have the gateway, which is the Oracle Recruiting Cloud or Talent Acquisition, where you’re going to hire an employee, they come in, go through the entire onboarding process, and then they continue the journey within the organization where they will be receiving benefits. Their payroll will be processed. They’ll be submitting timecards. There would be submitting absences or receiving benefits in the form of health care, insurance, medical benefits.
So everything is covered within Oracle Cloud HCM. Of course, talent management is a very integral part where they would be doing their performance appraisal, their goal setting, as well as they’re going to do their talent review. So, this is what is all about human capital management and as I mentioned, Oracle Cloud HCM is the way to go. One of the best products available. If you need everything in one umbrella, that’s the product. We are proud at FourthSquare to be implementing this for so many customers here.
The Evolution of Oracle HCM
Kerry Boudreaux
Awesome. All right. So we’ve talked about HCM in the big picture. It’s hiring to retiring. Let’s talk about this Oracle Fusion Cloud product that Oracle has. How did it come to be Sri?
Srijib Chatterjee (05:33)
Sure. I think one of the things which I’m really passionate about is that my journey with Oracle HCM or Oracle Cloud HCM is kind of so interrelated with the journey of the product itself. So, I just want to kind of outline my career.
When I started my career way back in 2004, this product was what we called Oracle EBS. It is one of the native products of Oracle. At that time, it was probably one of the best of the breed in terms of the HCM solution it provided. Then from Oracle EBS, I moved on to PeopleSoft. PeopleSoft HCM, again, as we know, is one of the best products still available. Some of the customers are still on it.
The transition for most of the customers from PeopleSoft to Oracle Cloud is complete. I was working in PeopleSoft from 2006 to 2009. And then at that same time, when I was working on PeopleSoft, Oracle decided to acquire PeopleSoft. Oracle EBS and PeopleSoft kind of came into being and they were kind of being offered by the same company, which is Oracle. And
Then in 2011, Oracle decided to launch Fusion, bringing the best functionalities of Oracle EBS and PeopleSoft into one single product on a single platform and offer it over the cloud to different customers. I started working on this product almost at the same time. I’ve seen really the native version of this product, like when they just started. I’d actually seen this product when it was being offered as an on-prem solution and then they moved on to cloud.
I’ve seen the on-prem version of this product and have started working on that. This product, like any other product when it starts, had issues. I still remember we had to raise a lot of SRs (e.g. Service Requests), but look where this product is today. It has come a long way. And I’m proud to be a part of this beautiful journey of this product where it had issues and today is one of the most robust solutions when it comes to HCM. And within this journey of almost 12 years, this product has come leaps and bounds. I’ve been fortunate enough to see all the versions of this product and working on all these versions. And I can vouch for this, that this is probably one of the most stable and robust solutions Oracle can provide. So that’s about this product.
Challenges in HCM Implementations
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah, awesome explanation of the journey and your journey as well. Let’s switch gears a little bit here, Sri. When it comes to implementations of Oracle HCM or any HCM solution, when you’re upgrading your HR software, there can be a lot of challenges. I said before, these are mission critical solutions and areas that you have to get right. I mean, if your people don’t get paid, that’s a pretty serious situation, right? What are some of the challenges that you’ve seen with implementing HCM solutions and how did you address those challenges?
Srijib Chatterjee
Sure. So I think one of the biggest challenges which we see going into an implementation is a lack of a modernized HR vision and a great employee experience. Like, what are your employees looking at? What would make the experience a great experience when it comes to your HR processes? I’ll give you a very simple example.
The other day I talking to a customer who was trying to implement a recruiting solution and in their current recruiting processes, they do have a referral process which is so important from a recruiting perspective. And they don’t have a way for the employees to refer external candidates. Today, their employees can only refer internal employees, which is not what, you know, we need as a referral process.
So they don’t have this. The current system doesn’t offer any way to go and refer any external candidate for the employees. So that’s the employee experience I’m talking about. If your employees cannot do that, then there is a serious problem with your entire referral process. And it’s not like you don’t want to open up your referral process for external candidate. It’s just that your system is not able to do it today.
And you, as a part of HR, are not providing those features and offerings to your employees. So I think that’s one of the biggest problems which we see when it comes to implementing HCM. And from there on, as we go into the implementation, some of the challenges which we face are the legacy system, especially when we see in the public sector.
They’re still using really archaic legacy systems where data extraction and converting that data into Oracle Cloud HCM itself can be a big challenge, which we encourage every time. So there have been instances where we have just gotten the data from the from the customer in a very raw format. And we had to translate the data to make sure that it goes into Oracle Cloud HCM. And of course, there would be issues with integrations, you know, if you are integrating with third party providers, such as on the recruiting side or on the learning side.
You might be integrating with ADP for let’s say your W2s. So it can become a challenge in terms of what vendors we are working at. If your vendors are not providing out of the box integrations, you might be spending a lot of time just understanding the design and creating those extracts for those different integrations.
So I think those are some of the definite challenges. And in terms of, I believe the products which we implement, let’s say we’re implementing payroll. Payroll in itself is a so complex model, right? Payroll consumes data from all the other different models. It’s where all the data kind of flows into and it processes the payroll.
So it consumes and processes the entire data. If the data is not flowing correctly, there could be really big challenges and as you said, your employees will not be paid properly.
When it comes to public sector, you see like fire departments, police department, emergency medical services, their time attendance can be so complex. They have shift differentials. They are using 24 hour shifts, 12 hour shifts, which spans across different days. So getting that data and processing it in payroll itself can be a challenge because of these different aspects of time and attendance and getting it consumed and processed in payroll.
Also, what I’ve seen are that payroll can be very complex for school districts. So, we are currently working on a couple of school districts where they have contract pay where teachers and principals, they would be working for 10 months or 11 months, but they need to be paid out for the entire 12 months where they need to be provided benefits. They need to be submitting absence during the 12 months, but they’re just working for 10 months or 11 months. That itself can be so challenging when it comes to implementing payroll.
So these are some of the challenges which we see, which we encounter on a daily basis in FourthSquare when we’re implementing HCM solutions for different customers.
Implementation Strategies and Best Practices
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah. So, I heard kind of a lack of vision for this modern user experience. And, I got to tell you with this generation and in generations to come, they expect that modern user experience, like they see when they’re buying online or doing their banking online, or whatever it may be.
When they come to work, they expect to see that when they’re interacting with their employer and with the organization. So great. Then there’s data conversion. I tell you between data conversion and then you mentioned payroll between those two, would it be fair to say that most implementation casualties happen around data conversion and implementing and making sure we get payroll correct?
Srijib Chatterjee
Absolutely. And as you see, they are interdependent, right? If your data quality is bad, you’re not going to be able to process payroll correctly. You need to bring in really quality data into the system to make sure that your payroll is being processed correctly, right? So I think those are such important aspects. And as you mentioned, one of the major modules, very critical module, for different customers is recruiting because that’s the starting point of all data. Like even after data conversion, when you’re maintaining the system, your data would be flowing in the gateway is recruiting, right? So, when you are implementing recruiting, it’s very important to understand that the module has the data entered correctly for a new hire so that when that data flows into payroll, the payroll is processed correctly.
Yeah, your recruiting and your system of records, which is your global HR and payroll should be implemented in a very accurate way so that we make sure that the payroll is process-connected for all employees.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah. So, great insight. Sri, if I’m an HR director and I’m looking at, re-up, you know, upgrading and modernizing our systems, I’m like, my gosh, I’ve got all of this. I’ve got hiring all the way to retiring. That is a huge task. There’s a lot of business disruption going on. I don’t know if I have the stomach for that. So do you do like a big bang? We’re going to do everything at once or do you kind of go on this as what I call a journey? Do we take it one step at a time? What is the approach and the best approach in your opinion?
Srijib Chatterjee
Absolutely, Kerry. I think, as you mentioned, it can be very difficult for a customer to consume everything at the same time. For most implementations, we do take a phased approach where we go to implement the more critical modules like your system of records, your recruiting, your payroll, benefits, time and attendance, or just go in together at the same time because they are all interrelated, right? You cannot leave one and implement the other, right?
So you’re implementing co-HRM, you say, hey, I’m going to do payroll. Later on, that’s not feasible because all these are like talking to each other and really deeply connected, right? So that’s usually our phase one where we would ask the customers to implement all these different processes together.
Once that is done in the phase two, we take the approach where they would be implementing modules like let’s say talent management, which is performance appraisal, goal management, talent review, succession planning, and also health and safety, risk management, as well as help desk. So those modules, they are extremely critical from an employee experience perspective, because an employee really wants to know, how was my performance last year? And based on that performance, how did I get paid? So that’s an extremely important part. Since we cannot, as we said, it might be very difficult for a customer to get everything together. So we kind of do it in a phased approach where we say, hey, talent can go later, because it’s really not talking to payroll directly.
Although there will be always an indirect connection, as I said, because pay for performance is one of the reasons, right? So, in most cases, we would do this as a second phase where you take talent management or health and safety and risk management as a second part of the, or a second phase of the project. So that’s the approach we usually take for different customers.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve seen situations where an organization just says, recruiting is so broken that we just want to do recruiting right now. We don’t want to touch everything else. We may do that later, but can an organization just come in and just implement Oracle Recruiting Cloud and it syncs up with the rest of their system, say payroll or whatever, is, is that a path that an organization can take?
Srijib Chatterjee
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it is always an option on the table. And with Oracle Cloud HCM, know it provides that flexibility. It has an amazing flexibility in terms of, hey, you can just implement one and leave the other and do it later on. And as you mentioned, you really want to improve your recruiting process. The way the recruiting is running today is not working for anybody. You are not able to tap into the talent in the market; to the right talent in the market because your recruiting system is so broken.
From that standpoint, we can definitely just implement recruiting and then build an integration between recruiting and your system of records, whatever is the legacy system of records. And then when the customer plans to move on to the other processes into Oracle Cloud Edge, we can do that later.
Ensuring Successful Adoption of HCM Solutions
Kerry Boudreaux
Awesome. So we’ve identified some of the challenges that you’ve seen with implementations. What are the one or two things, maybe three things, at your top of mind that an organization can do to ensure a successful HCM implementation?
Srijib Chatterjee
Sure, Kerry. I think we keep discussing about this all the time. I think for most of the customers, one of the things is what I’ve seen is the fear of adopting the product. So we have seen it so many times when implementation is almost complete. We are just three months away, a few months away. And then the customer is not ready to adopt the product and we have seen reasons like loss of talent, there are political issues within the organization and it kind of delays the implementation.
This is something, especially in public sector, I’ve seen a few times where we are almost there, we have done everything for the customer, we’re probably in the last testing cycle and then the customer just decides to postpone the project, right?
So getting the customer ready for the implementation is as important as doing the entire transformation project, right? The transformation is just not the system, but it’s the people. So you need to bring the people along with you to make sure that the system goes live along with the people who are ready to adopt that transformation.
That’s so, important. We can do that by having you know, a proper change management in place and change management doesn’t come at the end of the project, right? It needs to be ingrained into the entire implementation life cycle and the transformation life cycle. Where we start change management from day one, where we are asking our customers to do our testing, we’re making sure that they understand the process end to end and are making sure that they are also hands on with the product.
We are doing a proper knowledge transition as we move along the project. It’s just not happening at the end of the project. And of course, we know that there are things like train the trainer. The train the trainer needs to happen correctly where we are training our customers along the way as we implement the project and implement the different modules. Oracle Async Cloud.
I just want to talk about a beautiful product which we have within Oracle Async Cloud, which is called Oracle Guided Learning, where it’s kind of embedded into the product. It helps the employees, the end users, to go in and navigate the product by themselves with minimal help, right? Apart from the training which we are imparting to our different stakeholders, they can, using Oracle Guided Learning, go in and navigate through the product, understand the product by themselves.
I would definitely recommend them to use Oracle Guided Learning, whosoever is implementing Oracle Cloud HCM, so that it makes your training the trainer very easy. I think these are some of the very important aspects where we are making our customers a partner for that transformation or implementation and taking them throughout that journey to make sure it’s a very smooth transition the product. That’s very, very important.
Kerry Boudreaux
Yeah. So, I heard customer readiness and I think that is critical making sure the customer is ready to set sail on this journey. And a lot of times that comes from leadership and leadership sometimes has to make tough decisions, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do. This is the path that we’re going to take. We all need to get on board.” Right?
And then change management. I see a lot of times you get into these and you have some employees are like, “Heck no, I’m not going to do direct deposit. Heck no, I’m not going to sign up for benefits on a computer. I still want to go in and see my HR director.” But these are the types of changes that an organization is making to become more efficient.
Srijib Chatterjee
Absolutely Kerry, you’re spot on.
Conclusion
Kerry Boudreaux
Sri, I want to thank you for your time today. This has been very insightful; digging into this whole HCM, human capital management topic. For those of you that are tuning-in, thank you so much for joining us. If you have any questions or you need more information, just go to our website at http://www.fourthsquare.com/.
Again, I’m Kerry Boudreaux and we’ll be back in two weeks. From all of us here at the FourthSquare Solutions Podcast, until next time, continue to ask yourself, how can you be transforming your business through technology and innovation?
Srijib Chatterjee
Thank you, Kerry.
If you’d like to learn more about FourthSquare and the services we offer, click here to contact us. You can also call us at (972) 919-6135. We’ll be happy to speak with you.