HR apps help enterprises track and manage their work force. On IBM Power Systems, you have an array of choices.
It goes without saying that what makes enterprises function is the people who make it up. That makes managing an entity's staff a key function. Human resources (HR) applications help companies automate many of those management tasks and can be a crucial factor in maintaining a satisfied workforce.
HR departments are called on to provide many services to the organizational whole. The most crucial are controlling the employee lifecycle (hiring, retention, separation, retirement), administering pay and benefits, evaluating employee performance and behavior, planning best use of employee resources to meet organizational objectives, tracking employee training and growth paths, and managing relationships between employees, the enterprise, and sometimes employee unions. Also important are meeting governmental mandates for maintaining workplace diversity in hiring, managing programs for special-status employees such as veterans and the disabled, ensuring employee safety, and conforming to laws such as the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
Governmental Mandates Relating to HR
Federal and state governmental mandates vary in their requirements, usually with the number of employees at an enterprise. There are several important ones worth reviewing.
- The FMLA applies to entities that are public agencies or that employ more than 50 people who have worked 20 or more work weeks in the preceding year. FMLA allows employees who have worked at least 1,250 hours in the previous 12 months to take time off for specific family situations; the burden is on the employer to provide records to show that a specific employee requesting FMLA leave hasn't met the hourly work requirement.
- In the U.S., the various states administer Workers' Compensation programs, which provide medical care and income-replacement payments for employees injured on the job. Reporting and other requirements for this benefit vary but are necessary for enterprises of any size.
- The U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA), enacted in 1970, requires employers to protect employees from certain safety risks in the workplace. OSHA Form 300 is a mandatory report employers must file annually about workplace-related injuries that took place in the previous year, records which must be kept for five years. An OSHA Form 301 filing is required for each individual incident of employee workplace accidents.
- The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforces laws against workplace discrimination based on race, religion, gender, age, disability, and other factors. The EEOC requires employers to file regular reports about the racial, ethnic, and other categories into which their employees fall.
- Enterprises that hold contracts from the U.S. government are required to file reports to support claims that veterans of the armed forces are appropriately represented in their workforces. This is a requirement of the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1972.
Meeting these reporting requirements is necessary to avoid legal troubles, and there may be additional reporting mandates to consider depending on your geographic location. Whether or not the automation of these reports is an important feature your enterprise needs in HR software is a consideration you need to take into account in selecting an HR application.
HR Applications on IBM Power Systems
Human resources applications that run on IBM i vary in the number of services they offer and the functions they automate, which gives enterprises a fair amount of leeway in selecting how many functions they want to see embedded in their software and how many they want to leave to HR personnel to handle manually. While generally this will vary depending on entity size and numbers of employees, companies can also choose software based on the emphasis they want to place on various HR functions. For example, a company of fewer than 15 employees will have fewer governmental requirements and less need for automation of tasks such as managing employee recruiting and training. For larger entities, such features as governmental reporting, workforce analysis, employee self-service, and interfaces to other software such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications can be critical factors in selecting the best HR-related software.
This article provides a general overview of HR applications for IBM Power Systems. All applications mentioned below have a few features in common. All run under the IBM i OS (although they may also support other platform operating systems), and all provide security to prevent unauthorized access to or tampering with employee records, report-generation and inquiry capabilities for authorized users, and customization features, though the amount of customization varies widely.
Rather than provide a general description of each product, we've broken out key functions and given each a code so you can find at a glance those that provide a profile of services you're looking for to guide your own research. The codes used show services available from each application, according to information currently available on the vendors' Web sites. Additional attributes are also listed under a "features" note for each product. These include automation of reporting requirements for governmental mandates that are mentioned by the vendors' online materials.
For the purposes of this article, the service codes and types of information each deals with is as follows:
- Applicant tracking (AP)—Prospective employee applications, interview records, affirmative action and other compliance statistics
- Accrual tracking (AT)—Vacation and sick leave accrual and use
- Benefits tracking (BT)—Insurance data, bonuses, position prerequisites, stock options, flexible spending accounts
- Employee records (ER)—Assignments, salary history, training, memberships, and other personal data
- Employee scheduling (ES)—Work-assignment tracking, planning, and notification
- Evaluation management (EM)—Employee-review scheduling, employee testing and scoring
- Payroll and tax (PT)—Payroll, tax, and other deduction data for preparing paychecks of hourly and salaried workers
- Salary administration (SA)—Salary tracking, budgeting, and policy administration for employees as a whole
- Time and attendance (TA)—Hours worked tracking, possible interface to networked time-clock systems
- Workforce analytics (WA)—Enterprise-wide tracking and analysis tools for labor, overtime, absenteeism, and other workforce costs.
An asterisk (*) means that a coded service is provided by an integrated but separately licensed application available from the same vendor.
Please be aware that some features cited for certain products may also be available in other vendors' products but may not be explicitly mentioned in available online data. For example, it's likely that some HR software packages that don't specifically claim certain governmental reporting features in Web site materials may provide them anyway. You should consult with each vendor for a more complete listing of available features for each product.
And as always when looking for products or services, be sure to check the MC Press Online Buyer's Guide.
Human Resources Applications for IBM i
DAPREX
Services: AT, PT, TA, WA
Features: Although primarily an accounting suite, the product provides payroll and time-tracking with multi-company processing, user-defined attendance codes, hour-tracking by attendance code, and daily manpower requirements entry and reporting.
HarrisData Human Resources Information System (HRIS)
HarrisData
Services: AP, AT, BT, EM, ER, PT, SA, TA
Features: HRIS offers multi-company processing, salary review scheduling, warning messages for incomplete evaluation processes, what-if salary budgeting, spouse/dependent tracking, COBRA administration, property issuance tracking, job-requisition management, and applicant and employee skills tracking.
Lawson Software
Services: AP*, BT, ER, EM*, ES*, PT, SA, TA, WA
Features: This application includes recruiting, employee self-service data entry and inquiry, workflow tools, interface to MS Outlook, talent-management metrics, and teacher-contract administration.
Kronos
Services: AT, ES, TA, WA
Features: Kronos' product handles union-rule tracking, integration with third-party ERP applications, and "best replacement" tracking for absent employees.
Gamma Software
Services: AT, EM, ER, PT*, TA
Features: The software provides multi-company processing, user-defined employee categories and evaluation criteria, attendance codes, unlimited employee-history categories, and support for multiple types of attendance-data input.
Para Research
Services: ER, PT*
Features: The application includes user-defined forms for employee information, and support for EEO and VA reports.
Quest IV
Services: AP, AT, BT, EM, ER, PT, TA
Features: Quest IV offers interfaces to several third-party ERP apps, position management, health and safety management, unlimited payroll deductions, applicant and skill tracking, and company property assignment tracking.
Optimum Solutions
Services: AP, AT, BT, ER, ES*, PT*, TA*
Features: Optimum's product handles employee wellness tracking, employee self-service data entry and inquiry, workman's comp administration, and OSHA 300/301 reports.
Infor HCM (Human Capital Management)
Infor
Services: AP, AT, BT, EM, ER, ES, PT, SA, TA, WA
Features: Infor HCM provides employee self-service data entry and inquiry, talent management and succession planning, EEOC reporting, recruiting, workforce planning, and integration with Infor ERP apps.
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Human Capital Management
Oracle Corporation
Services: AP, AT, BT, EM, ER, ES, PT, SA, TA, WA
Features: Oracle's HR application is part of the EnterpriseOne (formerly World/OneWorld) ERP suite, and offers employee self-service data entry and inquiry, performance-review competency gap analysis tools, automated graphic organization chart creation, and recruiting tools.
Personal Evaluation & Resource Management System (PERMS)
Midrange Software
Services: AP, AT, BT, EM, ER, PT*, SA, TA, WA
Features: PERMS includes employee self-service data entry and inquiry, automated employee surveys with optional anonymity, COBRA administration automation tools, citizenship/visa information tracking, OSHA 300/301 reports, mass performance updates.
TCS Payroll and Human Resources
Tate Computer Services
Services: AT, BT, ER, PT, TA
Features: Tate's application offers payroll direct-deposit e-mail notifications to employees, direct-deposit to multiple accounts, employee self-service accrual-time viewing, labor-distribution journal, and Workers' Compensation reporting.
Timesoft
Services: ES, PT, TA
Features: Timesoft monitors network-attached time-clocks and provides data for payroll and HR management. It also offers flexible settings for any company policies and pay periods, support for multiple locations and companies, support for both hourly and salaried employees, tracking of lunch/vacation/sick data, and multiple audit trails.
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