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There is something that all companies out there have, and that is employees. Once a company grows, managing the time & attendance, compensation, recruiting, learning, succession and all the tasks related to Human Resources can become a challenge, and if not done right, can lead to unhappy employees.
In order to organize HR and make all the processes better, companies will often buy a Human Resources Management System (HRMS). A Human Resources Management System refers to the systems and processes at the intersection between human resource management (HRM) and information technology.
When considering a new HRMS, companies often look if they should go with a brand new product, whether it’s offered “on-premises” or in SAAS, or as an add-on on something they already have.
However, there is no built-in solution for managing human resources, and even creating an onboarding workflow customized to your company requires you to have SharePoint Development experts.
That is why a company called Lanteria, created a full HRMS solution that sits on top of SharePoint. Before reviewing it, here is a description of their product from the company website.
When you log in to Lanteria as an HR manager you get a dashboard showing you what your company looks like from an HR point of view. You can see how many absences today, how many employees you have as well as vacant position and some other stats. The dashboards are very business friendly, and you can easily go into more details in each one of them.
For example, when you go into absences, you have more dashboards such as Absence statistics, dynamics and the Bradford Factor. If you don’t know the Bradford Factor is, don’t worry as I had to Bing it as well. The Bradford Factor is a way to measure absenteeism and you can find more about it here. Those are part of the Time & Attendance module.
For most of the dashboards, you can change the parameters directly in the page.
Now, let’s take a look at the Core HR module part of the product. The Core HR module allow you to manage the company’s structure and define relationships between various departments, teams and employees.
The demo environment I was given, already had employees inserted, but it’s really easy to add new ones using a simple, SharePoint form. In the Core HR module, you can view the Organization Chart with or without showing the employees.
You can go in any organizational unit and see the positions, who’s in what role and if you have any vacancies. It is also worth noting that if you ever need to export the data for a meeting, or for your boss, you can easily press the Export button on almost all the dashboards/reports and you have an Excel/PDF/Word copy of what you see on the screen.
Job Roles, Categories and everything is stored in SharePoint lists, accessible from the Core HR menu, making it easy for HR professionals to add them without requiring extra training.
Next big thing in the Core HR module are reports. There are a bunch of reports that come out of the box, and you can always create your own custom ones if you need something more specific to your company.
With the reports provided, you have a lot of information where you can easily see the profile of your employees. For example, here is a Goal Statistic Dashboard.
And here is the Salary Range Chart!
The last part of Core HR I want to talk about is Employee Documents. With the Employee Documents function, you can set it up so that, for example, all employees of type “Sales Person” need to give you a copy of their Driver License. You set those up in the Settings part of the Core HR module.
Afterwards, in the Documents tab, you can easily see all the Documents related to the business Human Resource practice, and easily see who didn’t send you all their documents yet.
That is about it the Core HR module, now I will switch over to the Performance module. The Performance module is a performance appraisal system that automates the employees’ performance management, assessment, and appraisal processes.
As all Human Resource professionals know, doing a performance review of your employees, specifically aligned on their goals and job description is very import and must be done at least once per year! What I really loved about the Review Form designer is that you create only one template, for the whole company, however the contents of the form and what employees are evaluated on change for each employee, since they have their objectives assigned in their profile. That means, you do not need to create 100 different review forms every year.
To create a new form, just go to the Review Form Designer and add a new template. This is how an empty template looks like:
When you add a new section, you can select who has to fill it, as well as who should see it. For example, you might want to add a “Manager Rating” section, that you don’t want the manager to see, but you want HR to be able to see it. In my example, I simply added a where the employee can say if he completed his objectives this year.
Once you create your form, you have to go to Performance Reviews, and...
Afterwards, you can set workflows such as Employee > Manager > HR so the performance review goes through all the require roles for it to be complete. This module also has a lot of reporting built in, and you can run some quick reports, to see how employees are doing on their KPI’s for example.
The next module I am going to talk about is learning. Learning, is a big part of employee development and every company needs an internal Learning Management System (LMS) to provide training to employees as well as keep track of who finished what for both evaluation, as well as legal reasons in some countries / provinces.
Once you go in the learning catalog, you can view available learning grouped by either Category, Job Role or Competency.
For every class, you can set it up to either require approval by your manager or not. For example, for the class below, employees would need an approval before being able to add this course to their training.
However, a training can only be a document for which you don’t need any approvals, so you can add it to your plan. Once you add it, you have it in your personal development plan where you can launch it.
You can also use the Quiz builder to create quizzes.
You can view all the pending training requests in a cool dashboard and approve them directly from that view.
As with every other module, you have quite a few reports built in.
One of the reports I found useful, and I am sure a lot of business wish they had this on hand in a few second is the External training report.
Managing employees can be one of the biggest tasks of a company, since they represent it and if they aren’t happy, clients will know it. By implementing an HRMS, the Human Resources department has a better view of the current situation in the company, as well as being able to better help employees with their questions, or evolution of their position in the company.
In this blog post, I have reviewed Lanteria HR, a Human Resources Management System built on SharePoint. The product is honestly huge, in the sense that it has a lot of features, and if I tried to talk about each of them in this blog post, it would have been called an eBook. In this review, I talked mostly about the Core HR, Performance and Learning modules, as well as talked a bit about the Time and Attendance module. Having taken a few HR classes in University, I could clearly see the problems that every feature of the HRMS was trying to solve, and the software was very easy to use. The thing I probably loved the most, is all the Business Intelligence behind the HRMS, and the ability to export a report that gives the overall view of the company, as well as specific data in a few seconds.
The one thing that I guess most companies will find hard, and this is true for any HRMS you are going to buy, is entering the initial data and configuring all the description, competencies, organization chart, etc. However, once this is done, you have a very powerful system that will be easy to use and to update. If you are a Human Resource professional looking for an HRMS and you have SharePoint in your company, I highly suggest you asking them for a demo, and exploring the modules I didn’t cover in this review, as they can add a lot of value to the Human Resource Department.
