In any successful system, it’s crucial that each of the elements work together as part of a cohesive whole. Every environment from concert halls to operating rooms, from football fields to battlefields, requires everyone to work together in order to achieve their goals. The same is also true for business applications. The modern day has brought with it many exciting new technologies and ways to expedite productivity, but in order to reap the full benefits of these applications you need to ensure that they’re all working together, rather than against one another.
Take compensation management systems, for instance. Though you may be using one of these systems to replace a spreadsheet program, perhaps you still would like to have some (or all) of the data in Excel in order to rearrange, compare, and analyze it further. You don’t, however, want to re-enter all of the data by hand from your compensation program into a spreadsheet. It’s important, then, that your compensation management system is able to easily export data into a spreadsheet file to save precious time.
How about performance ratings? When planning salaries and merit increases, it’s critically important to have an idea of employees’ performances so you can compensate and reward them adequately. Many organizations, however, use a separate program to keep track of their employees’ performances. This would mean that they would need to keep cross referencing separate programs, entering data by hand into some third source (like a spreadsheet) in order to consolidate the relevant information and view it as a whole. By choosing a compensation management system that features integration with their performance management software, however, this consolidation of information would be automatic, saving them time and effort on an otherwise monotonous task.
Ease of integration is also critical. Do you have the internal resources at your organization to build the integration? Will you have to outsource the build to a third party supplier? Finally, what types of integrations does your performance management vendor and compensation management vendor offer? These are all critical questions when it comes to integration and something you have to know before beginning an integration project.
Finally, what about Payroll? The eventual result of the salary planning process is sending the finalized plans to payroll so that they can go about the business of actually compensating employees. If a compensation management system didn’t feature the ability to export relevant information directly to payroll, the result could cost you both time and employee morale – both of which directly translate to loss of money. Or, maybe your system can export but the format doesn’t meet the correct format for your Payroll solution. Will you have to spend time each and every month manipulating the data to correctly make pay adjustments? Once again, does your team have the capabilities to manipulate the data or will you need a third party to do so? But instead of having to segment out the data consolidated into a compensation management tool in order to feed it to payroll software, a program with easy integration could import and organize the necessary data immediately into your payroll system.
A group of people working together can accomplish far more in a shorter amount of time than one person ever could. The same is true of business applications, and especially compensation management systems. By working in conjunction with the other tools that your organization uses to save time and money, the right compensation management tool can make those tools even more useful. The result is like taking a discordant mess of sound and shaping it into a symphony.