When you attend a Payroll or HR systems conference, you often see many, many vendors there that seem to be offering similar solutions. It can be hard to determine what the differences are.
When an organisation goes to market for a new system, the person looking to select the system maybe very inexperienced . They are not certain of what the options are.
It can be a very confusing situation because every company that they ask will say that they do lots and lots of different things and it all sounds the same and looks the same
There are many vendors including:Workday, Frontier, Ramco, Ceridian, SAP, SuccessFactors and more
They all look better to the client than they’ve got at the moment because they’ve generally got an older system that’s not being used as well and they haven’t necessarily upgraded or enhanced to the newest version.
At Silverdrop, we’ve got very good understanding as an independent operator – working and seeing many systems over many years.
Silverdrop can help the client bring the who market of say 150 organisations in the HR tech space into a more workable short list to choose from. We do that by matching the size of the organisation and their needs to the market in a step by step process.
We call it HRIS Advisory and it gives you a well resourced, knowledgeable but independent ‘advisor’ to help you select the best system for your business.
Rarely will there be one system that does everything for you. It’s likely you’ll need a core system with other best of breed systems to do specific tasks within your business.
Be very wary of choosing one system for everything because almost every vendor is a specialist in something, and the other systems will be tacked on, and no where as good as a specialist system from another business who has that as their focus.
Generally, if you look at the vendors in the marketplace, they have different tiers that we talk about.
But the way that it works essentially is if you’re looking for HR and payroll software, they target different level levels of the market based on both the complexity of what they’ve got, the customisation and customisation ability that they’ve got to make the requirements.
Their own costs of running the system, the costs of the consulting that they offer, the amount of consulting and assistance they offer, plus level of documentation and general servicing that they do for clients. All this adds up to whether their system is a good solution for you.
A smaller business might be able to use MYOB effectively and get consulting at a lower price level. But MYOB can’t support the more experienced consultants and development for larger businesses.
SAP will still have an embedded cost in the seven figures – even if you are a smaller business – so it is out of reach for many businesses.
At the top end you’ve got Workday, SAP, Oracle, then in the middle of the market you might have Ceridian; Ramco; Frontier with Chris 21 and others.
In terms of choosing the vendor, you’ve got to choose it based on the size of organisation you are and the size that they used to dealing with.
Where SAP can get a very experienced person with 30 years experience on different systems, very technical, high level, managerial project managers, et cetera, because they’re going to charge the clients and get the money back off the clients and the clients want that level of expertise. In the middle of the road, people are going to have five to ten years experience and they’re going to be pretty good.
You also can see that bigger organisations have more developers working on their systems than smaller businesses, so over time they will be further ahead on technology and development. Good interfaces, security, cyber protection and so forth.
Often that’s not obvious at the front end in a demo, during a sales presentation.
Selecting the right vendor is important, and Silverdrop can help you navigate the market to find the right solutions for you.