Payroll vs Compensation: The sempiternal HRIS conundrum

RIO DE JANEIRO

Recently, a UN agency which is making the transition from an SAP-based HR system to Workday asked me what they should keep in their legacy system and what should be tracked in Workday. I was glad to share my knowledge and experience as this issue is something I witness in every HRIS implementation I work on. (Disclosure: In my distant past, I worked several years for the UN in New York and Madrid.) 

To understand the complexity of the analysis to be undertaken, you have to realize that the situation is radically different based on whether this is the first time you're embarking on an HRIS project versus whether you already had an on-premise HRIS system and are now moving to a cloud-based one.

If the latter, two situations may arise:

(1) Your scope includes Payroll: In that case it's to a large extent a shift-and-lift exercize. Of course, you may struggle with the limited availability of country payrolls in the cloud system you're moving to versus your legacy system (for instance, SAP has scores of country payrolls whereas Workday has only 4, with 2 more in the works.) This will limit your shift-and-lift capabilities as for the countries in your scope missing a cloud payroll you'll find yourself in a situation similar to the next one.

(2) Your scope doesn't include Payroll: either because (a) your cloud vendor doesn't cover your scope fully, or (b) because to minimize risk, you decided to keep Payroll out of scope for the time being. That's when you have to make a determination what to keep in your local Payroll system and what can be moved to your new cloud system's Compensation module. 

This exercize is similar to the one you'll have to run if you've never had a full-fledged HRIS in the first place. Or, which is the same, if your HRIS is basically your payroll system where HR Admin/Compensation and Payroll are subsumed in the same tool. You'll be surprised by how many companies, domestic or global, still fall in this category.

What is Payroll and what is Compensation?

There may be as many answers as there are unique circumstances. However, one can safely adopt the  following rules of thumb:

• Gross versus net: Compensation, and therefore your new HR system, should definitely hold your gross salary and similar items (such as allowances), whereas the net amount will be held by your local payroll. Don't get confused by the word "calculation" and think that all calculations are made in Payroll and simple amounts are held in Compensation. A Seniority allowance will have to be calculated first in Compensation and only when you have the amount due to the employee, will it then feed Payroll which, after performing a gross-to-net calculation, will then disburse the amount to the employee (via direct deposit or check.)
  
  
• Complex calculation: If a given compensation component needs to be calculated based on criteria and data which are not tracked in your new HRIS (let's say, time worked) then the decision is obvious: only track it in Payroll. 
  
  
• Compensation Package/Total Rewards visibility: One of the advantages of a modern HRIS is the ability to have all your employees' full compensation at your fingertips with a few clicks. If a compensation component is considered as meaningful and can be calculated in your HRIS then it should be part of Compensation. This criterion should definitely be taken into account when selecting a system as Workday, SuccessFactors and Oracle HCM Cloud (a.k.a. Fusion) are far from being interchangeable when it comes to their ability to take different data types into account when calculating a compensation item. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Document generation: If there is little doubt that producing a Payslip is a task best left with your local Payroll tool(s), you may decide that it makes sense from a business perspective that storing it in your new HRIS as part of Employee Documents (depending, of course, on your vendor's technological prowess.) On the other hand, if you use your HRIS to run your Annual Salary Review process, then generating your employees' Compensation Statements will be a task for Compensation, not Payroll.
  
  
• Many other criteria  and factors could also weigh in, depending on a company's unique circumstances, but remember the cardinal rule: Your new HRIS should NOT be a carbon copy of your Payroll, the two are linked but as explained in the few examples provided above they are quite different beasts and as such should be treated differently. 
  
  
  (The Blogger/Consultant, after having just implemented an Oracle-based HRIS is now taking a two-week vacation in the Wonder City before starting a new HRIS implementation project, this time based on Workday.)

Middle Kingdom: Musings on Chinese HR, technology and the country

SHANGHAI

The Oriental Pearl Tower  seen from the Bund.
As spectacular as un-Chinese since, unlike Muslim
minarets and Gothic cathedrals, Chinese palaces, pagodas
and pavilions have traditionally been low-rise affairs

Surprising as it may seem for the globe-trotter I am, until this week I had never set foot in China. Although I had worked on many global projects which involved rolling out an HR system for a Chinese workforce the opportunity never arose for me to visit the ancient land known to Marco Polo as Cathay* (the name is still used by one of the most successful airlines in the world, based out of Hong Kong.)

It was therefore with great trepidation that I boarded the world's largest aircraft, the Airbus A380, for the longest trip east that I had ever taken in order to spend most of the week in Shanghai with the local subsidiary of a multinational client. This was a unique opportunity to gather business requirements face to face with HR users in their local environment, something only imperfectly done in virtual meetings, on the phone or by email.

You soon realize that if in China rules and laws may not be voted on by a democratically elected parliament, but rather handed down by the omnipotent Communist Party, they are adhered to ferociously, as I was reminded when, during one of the workshops I led, I suggested we shorten the lunch break from one hour to 45 minutes. The reaction was a categorical NO. Labor laws are labor laws: one hour's break for lunch is one hour. Can't say I was shocked since that is exactly the same rule as in France (but outside the rest period, the Chinese workforce is a hard working one and I was impressed by the quality and dedication they bring to the task.) Actually, many other aspects of China's labor laws seem to be directly inspired from France's: such as the 1-2% of a company's payroll which must be set aside for the worker union to spend on employee benefits. But then French laws are at times very socialistic, if not outright Communist (ever wondered why the Labor Code in France is a little red book?)

Replica of Xi'an Terracotta Army
soldier, gifted to the blogger
by the Chinese delegation to the
UN World Tourism Organization where
he worked in the 1990s

A rapidly changing country
As everybody knows, China has managed to bring hundreds of millions of people into middle-class wealth faster than any other country on earth: in the past 25 years income per person has risen 13 times, whereas in the rest of the world the figure is barely 3 times. I see on Shanghai overcrowded roads more SUVs  than anywhere else but the US. Beijing has more billionaires than New York.  If there ever was a national success story it is China. And yet serious problems are looming: it is still an autocratic country, unemployment is rising, especially in the poorer rural areas in the country's western half, inflation is high (Shanghai home prices rose by 20% last year), the population is greying fast as a result of the one-child policy aiming at reining in demographic pressure, pollution shows its ugly face in many places with foul air a constant irritant. Some un-Chinese traits such as individualism and Western-style consumerism are on the rise in this increasingly unequal People's Republic. (I always marvel at Chinese tourists who buy designer bags at Paris upscale department stores for a price that is higher than many workers back home make in a year)

Now, to the topic at hand, requirements to manage a Chinese workforce as part of a global HRIS. In some aspects HR law and  practice in China may be complex, even cumbersome (but is there a place  where that is not the case?) However, in many other aspects it is quite simple and even free-market based, reminiscent of the practice in the (income-tax free) Persian Gulf states. For instance, in Europe and America, there is a quite clear-cut distinction between permanent employees and contractors, HR processes apply fully to the first, not to the second. In China, there are no contractors: everybody is a permanent employee. There are also no part-time workers. In other countries, some employees may work only 30% of the normal schedule, and in some cases be paid differently, all depending on labor agreements and regulations. In China, if you're going to work for a company, you work full time. Otherwise, go somewhere else. And no labor agreements either, which makes it much easier to set up compensation plans and eligibility rules

Art Deco glory.
East meets West at the spendid
waterfront neighborhood known
as the Bund

Over lunch, when the Head of HR asked me why there were so many strikes in France (yes, that national trait has made it to the other end of the world) I replied, "For the usual reason: to get more money." She looked very surprised: "Really? But if they want more money and they are not getting it from their current employer, why don't they just move to another better-paying company?" Admirable logic, which makes sense in a fast-growing, emerging market like China, but, alas, does not apply in sclerotic European countries like France.

Language-wise (you may want to brush up on my 5 pillars of "glocalization") if you're going to roll out a global HRIS in China, make sure all self service features are available in Mandarin. Otherwise, the system won't be used. Many HR power users, even if working for a multinational company, will struggle with English, so having the whole system in Mandarin is a must.

Workflows with different levels of approvals is also a must-have in a country where deference to senior management is part and parcel of the culture. Electronic notifications have made great progress in the Middle Kingdom but some document still need to be printed out for signature and be handed out to the relevant recipient. If you ever wondered why China is referred to as the Middle Kingdom it's simply the name in Chinese: The first character for the name is a horizontal rectangle cut in half by a vertical stroke, meaning, you've guessed, Middle. Like all great societies, China sees itself as the center of the universe. Can't blame them; after all, they are the most populous nation on earth, soon to be the richest, and the one with the longest continuous civilization in the world.

It's all about Human Resources

HR rules and HR Departments are nothing new in this country. The US only got its Civil Service with its grades and steps and examinations at the end of the 19th century, but the Chinese Ming dynasty, which ruled the country until 1644, already had a Department of Personnel with a nine-grade bureaucracy and legendary examinations one had to sit for and pass before being entitled to a position. Modern China is simply the heir to a long, centuries-old  tradition.

Among the various HR domains and processes, time recording can be quite complex in many Chinese companies, especially manufacturing now that China has become the world's factory. However, soaring taxes, transportation and energy costs means that China's labor force is no longer as cheap as it was. China will increasingly have to move up the value chain, which explains the strong emphasis on training, competencies, learning and development, and executive assessment. Again, nothing surprising in this ancient Confucian culture where learning values  are rated very high.

The blogger ready to board the Shanghai
MagLev Train. At an average speed of 300 km/186 m
per hour, with a peak speed of 430 km/237 m per hour,
it is the world's fastest train.  It is also the only one that runs on
magnetic-levitation technology.  Whether it is profitable
remains to be seen as it is pricey and covers a short distance
(in a highly congested area, though)

Payroll, is of course, highly regulated like everywhere else, but China is far from being the worst offenders. And there are limits to nannying employees: for instance, salary advances, which in some countries are mandatory if requested by the employee, simply don't exist in China You are paid for the work done, not the promise of it. For any help, go to your family, is the message in a culture where family bonds are stronger than in the West, but weaker than in Mao's times (In China people don't resort to banks for their savings needs but rather to the family or peer-to-peer networks.)

Absence management is also complex, and China is rather unique in that it distinguishes between absence types mandated by law and  those awarded by a company as a benefit for a differentiated treatment. The former  have to be taken during the take period, and if the employee leaves before its end they are compensated; whereas the latter, if not taken, are lost and are not compensated. And just as part-time employees are unusual, taking an unpaid leave or a sabbatical is unheard of for most people. Note the existence of many recruiting and training agencies (such as Zhaopin or 51job.)

Benefits involve many players: government, worker union and employer. Noteworthy that if some benefits (such as birthday allowance) are not provided by the worker union then the employer will play the substitute role and provide them.

In a  country where education has long been seen as a passport  to success, small wonder that competency frameworks, training agencies and learning models are all the rage. Many companies would finance employee degrees in exchange for a guaranteed stay with the company (similar to tuition reimbursement by US companies.) For some useful training (such as languages), private enrollment would also be refunded by the employer if the employee brings evidence of the certification thus earned.


China's HRIS vendors hold their own
To meet the HRIS needs of Chinese companies, whether domestic or subsidiaries of multinationals, the array of providers is quite large. SAP's market share is largely around its on-premise offering, and Oracle's is based on PeopleSoft. Cloud vendors are represented by Workday, a distant third but growing fastest. Kronos is well-entrenched when it comes to time management. Unsurprisingly for such a highly patriotic, even nationalistic, country, Chinese vendors have, together, a majority market share. They include household names in China such as Beisen, the undisputed talent company, and other vendors such as Neusoft (or even micro-blogging firm Weibo) covering various HR processes, when not the whole gamut of functions.

The biggest challenge facing homegrown vendors is how to go global, not an easy task when some tools which we take for granted are not available in China. First-come visitors to China may be surprised, even shocked, to find that social media and internet tools like Facebook and Google are banned (unless you, or your company, are lucky to have your own VPN.) In the West, and even the rest of the world, so much HR work, actually so much business work, involves using these platforms that you may be thrown offbalance when you realize you cannot keep up with your friends (on Facebook), get your email (on Gmail), check a video on YouTube, or plan an itinerary on Google Maps. Surprisingly and erratically WhatsApp, despite being a Facebook product, is allowed to operate in China. The Chinese make do with local variants such as Baidu, Weibo or WeChat (which is integrated with LinkedIn.).

The Chinese are a justifiably proud nation, but also a pragmatic one. They will find ways to live up to their full potential and be a full member of the global business community, something they've longed for and craved for a long time.Needless to say that this post only covers the People's Republic of China (PRC) aka Mainland China. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao are completely different in terms of context, HR maturity and vendor landscape. In due course they will warrant their own blog post.

(The blogger is currently crisscrossing the globe gathering requirements for a multinational company. Next stop: Detroit, USA.)

(This is the latest in a series of wide-ranging articles focusing on a single country. Previous posts:

August 2011: Brazil Rising: Thoughts on HR, technology and an emerging giant 
December 2012: My 20-Year Affair with Spain  - with more than 9,000 views it is one of my most popular blog posts
June 2013: Thoughts on India, its HR/technology space
Nov. 2014: Of Switzerland, the country, its HR practice and technology landscape)

NOTE: All photos are the work of the blogger and copyright applies

From the blogger's library

*I strongly recommend Gary Jennings' superb novel, The Journeyer, about the great man's 13th- century travels throughout a China few  people had ever seen then. 1,000 pages which you can't put down until you reach the end. For anybody wanting to understand China's wrenching changes in a historical perspective, Jonathan Spence's In Search of Modern China is a must-read. Nobel-Prize winner Pearl Buck's novels, set in pre-Communist post-Imperial China,  have a lot to say about the Chinese soul and experience. The movie buff I am relishes Zhang Yimou's movies (especially when the incomparable Gong Li is in them): Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Red Sorghum and Flying Daggers are favorites. He is also the man behind the highly acclaimed opening and closing ceremonies at Beijing's 2008 Olympics. 

SOW - A Comparison of 3 Global Cloud HR vendors: SAP, Oracle and Workday

GENEVA & NEW YORK

The leader, the follower and the laggard

I have been asked for a while to share my system-evaluation and -implementation experience with the community and my readership by comparing the three most frequently shortlisted cloud HR systems: SAP (SuccessFactors), Oracle (Fusion) and Workday. I will from now on refer to them as SOW, to be pronounced either to rhyme with "low" (as in "low adoption") or to sound like a female pig since some of these vendors' features are no better than lipstick on a pig. *

Of apples and oranges
Although there are more than three cloud-based HR vendors, the reason I am limiting myself to the SOW usual suspects is because they are the only ones with a global reach to meet the complex requirements of multinational companies. Despite attempts to the contrary, Ultimate is still a US vendor, Meta4 has all but disappeared, HR Access has been folded into Sopra and Cornerstone has yet to make up its mind whether to develop a full-fledged HR Admin module - and without an HR system of record you cannot have a global HRIS worth its salt. ADP is mainly a payroll outsourcer with multiple products (some in the cloud and covering various HR processes) but not a global HR system of record. Infor has yet to rationalize its product offering à la Fusion and its Lawson offering was never a truly global HRIS. And some of these vendors' "cloud" offerings are really nothing more than a quick repackaging of their old hosting business. So, here we are, stuck with SOW.

This being said, it is worth remembering that to a large extent  we are comparing apples and oranges since there are such key differences between these vendors that some evaluation exercises can turn to the surreal. Oracle, for instance, is mainly a database vendor with a strong anti-cloud history and a PeopleSoft legacy customer base which has yet to endorse Oracle Fusion. SAP, which comes from the application world, has therefore more serious credentials, reinforced by its continuing investment in the SuccessFactors platform. Its main issue is that, in addition to some questionable product decisions, it has yet to articulate a cogent cloud-based ERP strategy.  This is the main reason why I refer to Oracle and SAP (along with some others) as dinosaurs in a popular blog post. Workday, on the other hand, is of course a native cloud vendor which has quickly shot to the top of the league table with an offering, business culture and service quality that the other dinosaurs can only dream of emulating. Yet, Workday is far from perfect and also has some serious issues.

SaaS and cloud
Some companies may not care about the differences between SaaS and cloud, some may even be ignorant of them, but it is good to remind my readership of the meaning of these  two concepts which are often and wrongly used interchangeably. SaaS is the most advanced form of the cloud where all parts of an offering (hardware, database, software) come from a  single vendor. All you the customer need to provide is a browser-toting device (desktop/tablet/smartphone) and you're in business. Workday is thus a true SaaS vendor. SuccessFactors, whose offering relies on some on-premise legacy features which are hosted, is getting there but cannot be considered 100% SaaS. As for Oracle, who first developed its Fusion product as  an on-premise solution, and can deliver it as a hosted system, it is therefore in the cloud but of course not SaaS. So remember this key differentiator: All SaaS systems are by definition cloud-based, but the reverse is not true.


Stats wars
As the community knows, I have zero tolerance for fanciful figures, especially around customer numbers. Some of the fairy tales I hear are so absurd that I am unsure whether to laugh or sob when I hear them. The below scorecards provide a reasonable count of LIVE customers as per each cloud system. If the customer is still on PeopleSoft for HR Admin and has interfaced it to Taleo or some Fusion talent modules, Oracle will refer to this misleadingly as Cloud HCM. I don't. Same thing for SAP: If Employee Central is not implemented, then I do not count SuccessFactors as a reference - it is only a talent project, not a global HR one. Workday is easier since, by definition, their system cannot run without core HR as a foundation (although some customers use a light HR version to start with talent processes such as performance.)

Integrated/interfaced/unified/organic etc.
After phony customer count figures, the biggest source of BS that comes from vendors has to do with how well integrated the offering is. Here misinformation is rife, with Oracle the undisputed leader. Fusion, which can come in different flavors as mentioned earlier (public cloud, private cloud, on-premise - see below) does not necessarily cover all HR processes and most customers prefer to hang on to the legacy core HR. Talent features can come from either Fusion or Taleo. And within Taleo remember that the Learn.com product was built on .NET technology whereas Taleo was built on Java.

SAP SuccessFactors at least developed Employee Central on its own technology stack; however Plateau was not a 100% SaaS offering, and Concur and Fieldglass are based on other technologies. The other SF modules are also on different technologies which means a customer running the whole suite will have different code bases AND versions. (And as for Multiposting, well, nobody knows when/if it will be integrated in SF/EC.) Not pretty, and not full SaaS. And, of course, Employee Central Payroll is anything but an Employee Central payroll.

Workday, on the other hand, as befits a product developed from scratch and organically, has the cleanest data model with all HR processes now available, except Learning. Payroll is largely work in progress, with the last two countries released (UK, France) yet to go live with a customer. I still have my doubts as to the ability of a single global SaaS payroll vendor to deliver the goods in an efficient manner.
I can already hear some jump and say, "Hold on a second. Workday, too, has integrated third-party technologies after acquiring Cape Clear and Identified." Most true, but there is a fundamental difference when you integrate a third-party product as part of your underlying technology and when you do it to cover a specific HR domain. With the latter you find yourself with a different look and feel, different workflows, a different data model. Any HR user who had to struggle with different products would tell you what a nightmare it is.

3 -VENDOR ANALYSIS: COMPANY COMPARISON

Oracle Fusion has come a long way from an on-premise, complex-to-implement, functionally limited product with an ugly look and feel (those overloaded screens with horrid blue!), to one that can be deployed in the cloud. To get a sense of Fusion's background, refer to my post "Error 404: Oracle Fusion not found".) Since then, it has made progress (especially on the  UI front when it moved from FusionFX to Skyros), but its two other competitors, both cloud natives, have moved faster and often better. Oracle still misses many key HR domains (see the product scorecard below) and its vision and roadmap at best are fuzzy, at worse don't make any sense: Why waste its time developing unneeded products such as Employee Wellness, Reputation Management, My Volunteering or low-priority ones such as HR Help Desk, and still miss, Tier-1 country localizations or Recruitment on the Fusion platform? The co-existence or hybrid approach is not a meaningful differentiator, but actually a sign of weakness: Missing key bits, Oracle tends to lump everything together and it's up to the customer to make sense of what is what and how to integrate it, not an easy task when Oracle is still not very forthcoming when it comes to its offering, as explained below.

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Cloud ServicesThe Taleo product line is a case in point: Officially rebranded as Oracle Talent Cloud (but on their website still referred to as Oracle Taleo Cloud) it is supposed to be the Recruiting offering to be interfaced to Fusion Core HR. However, the overlap issues (Fusion Performance vs Taleo Performance, say, or Fusion Compensation vs Taleo Compensation) has yet to be resolved. Ask the question and  you'll get a mumble from poor sales executives who are none the wiser. Note that Taleo is a hodgepodge of various acquisitions itself: Learn.com (with its scaling issues), Jobpartners, Recruitforce and Vurv, and Wordwide Compensation. (Not to mention that there are two Taleo flavors that go by the Enterprise and Business monikers)Talking about Compensation I find it a pity that Fusion does not allow user-defined logic to go into compensation elements, for instance to add a regional rate to a pay rate and calculate an employee's compensation on that basis.
Fusion, born as an on-premise product, can be hosted in a private cloud (customer's own environment) or shared (public cloud) with different deployment implications.
As if  the (con)Fusion was not enough, you have PeopleSoft Cloud Service which is as far from a SaaS offering as St Petersburg, Florida is from St Petersburg, Russia.
Then there is a host of other products such as Right Now Policy Automation (benefit eligibility), another acquisition, which Oracle throws at befuddled customers.
Making sense of Oracle's offering is clearly not for the faint-hearted.

Great products are built by great people. The converse is also true: Mediocre people build mediocre products. Oracle, with its stifling bureaucracy and awful management, has problems attracting and retaining quality people, especially in the HCM ¨product line. Add to that the fact that in Oracle's highly political culture the technology side has always had the upper hand versus product, and that HCM has always been the Cinderella application, only getting attention when a top leader emerges (first PeopleSoft, and now Workday.) This explains why the company never features in Great Places To Work league tables and has suffered from a steady hemorrhage of its best and brightest from PeopleSoft who have been poached from Workday, leaving a lot of deadwood behind.

An even bigger biggest issue with Oracle is how it (mis)treats its long-suffering customers. Just this week, an old customer, the  French Civil Aviation Authority, who has had enough of Oracle's abusive licensing and audit practices, decided to discontinue the use of all Oracle products. Last year, two other French companies, Carrefour and AFPA, went to court over the same issues and won. In 2014, a survey by the Campaign for Clear Licensing of 100 global Oracle customers found that 92% of them were deeply unhappy with the vendor. In the US, none other than the federal government decided in 2012 to ban Oracle from bidding for its business due to the vendor's questionable sales practices. Well, you get the idea. Unless you evince a particularly strong masochistic streak, selecting Oracle often  means tough times ahead.

On the technology front, Fusion, contrary to the vendor's spin, is not a "fusion" of its portfolio applications, but neither is it exclusively based on its unpopular EBS product line even if it borrows many features from it such as FastFormulas and Flexfields - the latter permeates Fusion even more than with EBS thus allowing good customization possibilities. However, Forms have mercifully been retired in favor of more modern Java and SOA-based technology. Outbound integration is a big headache as is data migration, even from Oracle's legacy systems. It is noteworthy that if many Oracle customers prefer to implement Fusion in the cloud rather than on-premise it is (in addition to the natural preference for the cloud), because, first, the HR Admin part has yet to reach functional parity with PeopleSoft (or Workday) and, second, the technical complexity of doing so is not to be ignored (just the sizing requirements would discourage the best-intentioned customer.)

Although initial pricing can be quite seductive (Oracle heavily discounts Fusion in order to drive up customer adoption, or offers a credit to swap on-premise applications for cloud-based Fusion), the vendor's customer-relations record, as mentioned earlier, is far from reassuring. Also, if you are an-on premise customer and are renewing/extending your license, Oracle will throw a cloud subscription at you included in the package. You might as well take it, even if you are unsure whether you'll actually move to the cloud.

In summary, customers  who already run an Oracle HR application (PeopleSoft, EBS, JDE), have a good rapport with the vendor (admittedly a rare occurrence), negotiate a financially interesting migration, do not need cutting-edge technology or terrific look and feel, and don't mind not being pampered or the complex integration behind products that come from disparate technological stacks, can look at Fusion seriously, especially when taking into account a strong point: its reversibility. Surprising as it may sound, there are still companies out there that are wary of the cloud (after the NSA snooping scandal and the current legal tug-of-war between US authorities and Apple and Microsoft you can't really blame them): With Oracle you can bring your HR system within your corporate firewall without having to switch systems and go through another complex implementation. This advantage comes at a hefty price, though: no single code line for all customers since, depending on what flavor of Fusion customers have, they can stay on their version much longer than public cloud customers. There are therefore multiple versions of Fusion at any given time, which increases the cost of running the product. And, as we all know, the customer always ends up bearing the costs. And if you are a customer who is still on the old look and feel, moving to the new one is not a straightforward process.

The world's largest business-software vendor, and the one with the most localized payrolls, took a leaf from its nemesis Oracle when it went down the acquisition road by acquiring SuccessFactors (SF). However, as I explained in detail in my blog post on their strategy just after the transaction was announced, SAP differs markedly from Oracle: Rather than build from scratch a product for the cloud, in which neither had any experience, SAP decided to continue investing in the SF platform by beefing up its Core HR/HR Admin product a.k.a. Employee Central (EC). Although the latter has grown significantly since its earlier releases, it has yet to catch up to the group's leader, Workday.

One increasingly important strong point of SF is that it belongs to a European vendor. With all the data-privacy issues raised by NSA snooping, many companies (especially European ones) are loath to go with a US-based vendor with a loss-of-data Sword of Damocles hanging over them.

Three weaknesses from SAP SF have yet to be solved:

-SF is still missing a payroll module based on its own platform, and the misleading Employee Central Payroll (in reality a hosted SAP Payroll) is no substitute for a truly integrated offering. SAP brought us the largest number of localized payrolls on earth; Why can't it use that expertise to enhance SF and make it a truly global and comprehensive HR offering? No full-fledged global HR system has come to market without its own payroll, so the jury is still out on whether SAP can be the exception that proves the rule.

- The multiple code lines and releases that make up the SF platform need to converge on a single code line and release based on EC. It is bad product design and worse customer support not to inform a customer that they are not enjoying a critical feature because they are on a older release  as happens with many customers. (Workday would never allow that to happen if only because the window customers have to move from one release to another is expressed in weeks, not months or years as is the case with SAP or Oracle.)

- SAP is also the vendor that brought us the integrated ERP. But it seems that all the strongly vaunted advantages of a single-platform ERP got lost in the move from on-premise to the cloud. All the HANA'ing in the world cannot hide the fact that the company that gave us the on-premise integrated business software is incapable of pulling the same trick in the brave new world of the cloud.

In a recent blog I compared SF's and Workday's pricing so no need for me to repeat myself since that analysis is recent and  therefore up to date. Oracle's talent-retaining issues are not unknown to SAP (I covered it in my recently updated blog post "Could the last executive leaving SAP turn the lights off, please?")

Another issue SAP needs to fix is the implementation methodology. SF came with its own methodology, SAP had another one, and integration partners are at times unaware of which is which. This will hardly help in building confidence in the offering. And the implementation template that SF provides does not list implementation activities in detail so you are often on your own. (Compare that with the fastidiously detailed documents you get from Workday)

Noteworthy is SAP's equivalent to Oracle's co-existence deployment model called here the Talent Hybrid model. The two approaches are not much to write home about since customers have been doing it for a while: Integrating their on-premise HR system of record with cloud-based talent features. Actually, customers started doing it even before SAP and SF found themselves under the same roof.

Who is the most likely customer for SF as a global HRIS? Experience shows that it is mainly SAP's on-premise customers who move to the cloud with it, especially if they are already using SF for their talent needs (in particular Performance or Learning.) However, an increasing number of SAP's on-premise customers include Workday in their cloud evaluation, and a worryingly lengthening list have decided to go with it. SAP, as a vendor, and SF, as a product, need to make themselves more attractive to retain these fickle customers.

3 -VENDOR ANALYSIS: PRODUCT COMPARISON

The HR thought leader and Wall Street darling has revolutionized the HR technology world (that search-based navigation was truly something out of this world when it first came out) and has just passed $1 billion in revenue (in comparison, Oracle's cloud HR business makes up less than 1% of its total revenue.) Workday also has more customers using it as a cloud-based HR system of record than Oracle and SAP  put together. They say that plagiarism is the best form of flattery; considering how many features of Fusion and SuccessFactors were obviously copied from Workday who premiered them, the newest kid on the block still retains its thought leader's crown.

What is attracting the crowds is a native-cloud product, built with consumer-grade usability, a depth of functionality that only those who built PeopleSoft could engineer, a customer focus and engagement that is still unique in the industry. The latter has made the vendor evolve its approach significantly: For instance, from the four releases a year at the beginning to a more manageable two now. Workday has also listened to customers and forsaken its rigidly neutral system-integrator (SI) approach: it will now recommend a specific SI for a specific project, something that was anathema for so long.

All the oohing and aahing about Workday, most of it well deserved, cannot hide that not everything is hunky-dory in the Pleasanton, CA-based HRIS heaven. You can read my Open Letter to Workday's founders for a discussion of these issues. There are still some surprising holes to plug in the offering such as the production of contracts and offer letters or some workflow limitations (despite the fact that their workflow framework is the best of the three.) So far, Payroll has been limited to North America and no date has been set for the release of the Learning piece. The talent features have been improved significantly, in no small measure through the addition  of a Recruitment module (some integration issues with their Core HR need  to be fixed), but Workday has yet to reach functional parity with SuccessFactors in the talent space.

Reporting is undoubtedly one of Workday's strongest suits. For those who use PeopleSoft, it is such a relief not to need to be a PeopleTools expert to write Workday reports. To a large extent you can even say that Workday is a collection of reports since wherever you are in the system you can pull up the relevant reports many of which are "actionable" to use the hackneyed word. But, careful, user-friendliness here is more for the HR team, not occasional users, and it may be better to restrict the creation of reports to a core reporting team rather than jeopardize consistency by having any/everybody duplicating existing reports.

Customization, or lack thereof, is the hallmark of SaaS systems. Unfortunately, in the  real world companies need a certain amount of customization which will not be lost when upgrading. Squaring the circle, you may think.  Workday's custom objects is a move in the right direction, but it has its limitations: There are only so many custom objects you can have, you cannot use them where you see fit and cannot pull them up necessarily where needed. SuccessFactors, with its Metadata Framework-based extensibility approach (especially in Employee Central), does a better job in that respect and so does Oracle (with Flexfields, as mentioned earlier), as befits a product that is available both on-premise and in the cloud.

Workday's greatest success has probably been that a significant segment of their customers comes from companies that either had a Tier-2 vendor or did not have a single, global HR system of record (they used various payrolls and different talent tools.) When these customers finally get their act together, they tend to look at Workday first, rarely at SAP or Oracle. However, cloud-seeking SAP and Oracle customers will almost always evaluate Workday, even if they don’t systematically select it: that does not bode well for the dinosaurs’ cloud future.

3 -VENDOR ANALYSIS: TECHNOLOGY COMPARISON

NOTE ON SCORECARD METHODOLOGY
The grading is based on the many RFPs I have worked on and demos I have attended, along with my own knowledge of these products (derived in no small part from my own use of the systems) and feedback from customers other than the ones I have worked for.
The analysis has been done based on three sets of criteria: Vendor, Product and underlying Technology. Where awarding a grade does not make sense (such as pricing: expensive does not in and of itself mean bad, since often quality comes at a premium) I have left the relevant cells colorless. An explanation of most of the grades can be found throughout this blog post, but I have also mentioned them in the scorecards so that the reader can understand why a vendor is getting a YELLOW rather than an AMBER, for instance.

NOTE ON SOURCES AND COPYRIGHT
All data and graphs are by Ahmed Limam who is hereby asserting his copyright. They can be referred to with proper copyright and authorship acknowledgement.

*Some of the ideas in this post were first presented in an article I wrote for TechTarget in January 2015.

(In addition to the vendor-specific posts I mention throughout this piece, there are many more I wrote in the past few years focusing on a vendor or a particular issue. The most popular ones can be found in the list provided in the top-right corner and automatically updated based on viewer number. For other posts, you'll have to scroll down and search for them one by one). 

Going Global: HR Hub, HR System of Record or Talent Profile? - That is the Question

All the global HR data that's fit to capture

PARIS
This is the latest in my "Going Global"  series of posts. In "Glocalization or the Five Pillars of a Localized Software" I discussed what it meant to have a "glocal" HR project. In "A Five-tier Approach to a Multi-Country Payroll Project" I touched on the always sensitive issue of payroll for an international company.

Today, I'd like to share my experience and thoughts on  what, chronologically, should come first: how to organize a global workforce data.

First of all, why are we even bothering with this, some of you may wonder. I was recently talking to the HR director of a global life-sciences company and, when I asked how many employees they had, she replied, "14 or 15 thousand, maybe 16,000...unless it's gone up to 17,000 after the latest acquisitions." She eventually confessed, "Actually, we have no idea."

"You mean, you don't have a global tool where you centralize all your employee data?" I asked. She nodded her head.

Unfortunately this company, whose name compassion demands I keep secret, is far from being the only one in a similar situation. The sad truth is that way into the 21st century  there are still many global companies, some quite large and with high name recognition, who still have no idea of their headcount worldwide. Somebody explain to me how you can manage a global workforce when you don't even know how many they are, let alone where they are, what they do and how much they cost you.

Dear HR Leader, you shouldn't feel proud of yourself for allowing such a situation to continue under your  stewardship. Hopefully, this gentle prodding will jolt some of you into action.

There are basically two schools of thought about organizing your workforce data: one favors creating all your employee data, regardless of what country they are in, in a single repository called a global HR System of Record (SOR) or Information System (HRIS). Other companies prefer to keep different HR systems per country or regions and aggregate the data in a global HR hub (also known as global HR Master Data.) I will discuss the pros and cons of both with some best-practice tips before talking about a third type of data repository that has been gaining in popularity in the last few years: the Global Talent Profile.


1. GLOBAL HR SYSTEM OF RECORD (SOR)

This approach is the neater and tidier of the two as it tracks in the same system all relevant data pertaining to your employees be they in Afghanistan, Algeria, Austria, Argentina or Australia. The following are some advantages that I have witnessed.

• It allows for consistent reporting, as well as data and process streamlining, which is always important when trying to foster a common culture across subsidiaries belonging to different parts of the world. I am still amazed at the variance in organizational structure between different subsidiaries with similar size, business background and whose only justification is history. I always start telling my clients that History is a great discipline, but in the world of business if your only rationale for a process is history, you are soon going to be...history!
• A common user experience across different time zones: there are few things more frustrating for an HR user with global responsibilities than to have to toggle back and forth between radically different tools. Finding the required information, launching a particular  process or producing a required report can be so time-consuming that sometimes you just forgo carrying out these tasks which is detrimental to the business. It is so much easier to create a reporting relationship between Employee A in China and their manager, Employee B, in South Africa, when both are part of the same data structure than when you have to struggle with different systems that have their own data model, architecture and access rights.
• Even more important, for the global VP of HR, or the CEO if s/he feels so inclined, is to see at a glance consolidated vital statistics about the workforce to support decision-making, and, added bonus, in real time. Another key advantage is that having a single system of truth makes it even easier to feed other systems that depend on HR to produce other processes, whether HR-related (such as payroll or benefits) or not (e.g. procurement.)
• Also,without the synchronization of a single version of the employee-data truth  it is impossible to have a meaningful on/offboarding process. Many companies lose sizable amounts of money because they terminate employees and give them their last paycheck without having recovered expensive equipment (laptops, smartphones etc.) they were given. Maybe the employee understood that "given" as literally. And once the employee has left the company with his/her last payslip you can kiss goodbye to ever getting corporate property back. 

Although an increasing number of companies are adopting this approach, it still accounts barely for one-third of all global companies. The reasons are manifold:

• There are not many vendors that can provide you with a truly "glocal" HR system (see my aforementioned post about the definition of a true "glocal" system) that match your country footprint.
• It is a complex task to reconcile in a single system data that is statutorily required in countries as varied as the US and France, to take just two examples. The American salaried/hourly distinction is unknown in France which relies on a manager/non manager (cadre/non cadre)  category. It therefore becomes very tricky to arrive at a meaningful comparison of employees across different time zones. (FTE comparisons are another global HR headache since definitions vary across countries as to what is an employee, especially when contractors are used.)
• Ignorance and lack of interest from HR managers, especially at corporate level, means that no effort is made to remedy this situation until the CEO throws a fit because the company's latest annual report was too vague about global headcount. And one thing that shareholder and financial analysts do not like is vagueness about such possible liabilities. (After the CEO has been pacified by an explanation about the complexity of the problem, the global Head of HR often moves on to other issues and forgets about this "inconvenience" until some other crisis comes up and reignites the issue.)

For all these reasons, a majority of global companies still rely on multiple systems which can be consolidated into a global HR data master or hub


2. GLOBAL HR MASTER DATA (OR HUB)

In this approach, corporate policy is based on a "live and let live" approach whereby every subsidiary decides on what system they want as their local HR system of record and these are then consolidated through a master data system which in turn can feed into third-party systems and be used to produce reports. Some key points:

• Local systems and processes are not disrupted, which can be of value if there is no agreement on global processes. I have seen too many situations where subsidiaries are asked to jettison a system for   a new one in which they have had little say in shaping it, or, even worse, where the features on offer were inferior to what they used to have.
•  As the below graph shows, most local subsidiaries would use a local HR admin system, often based on a  local vendor. Others use their payroll system as a proxy core HR system. Home-grown and outsourced systems make up the difference.
• Best practice dictates that interfaces be built between the Hub and the third-party systems. Unfortunately I still see some companies preferring the double-entry approach where data are entered twice: in the local system and in the Hub. This is pure madness as not only is it more expensive to do, but is prone to errors.
• It is also important to note that many companies use a Global HR Hub just to run reports off it as Phase 1 of the project. They then build interfaces to feed the data contained in the Hub to third-party systems. Whereas I feel the former  makes sense as a stopgap tool, once you move to the latter, you might as well start considering seriously a Global HR System of Record: sure, this one will also require the creation of some complex interfaces, but they will always be by definition fewer than what a Master Data system will entail. 

One of the big drawbacks is that some processes will break as you move from one system to another as workflow which initiated in one application does not span all others. The fact that other organizational structures will not be replicated "as is" is another issue, too.

It is worth mentioning that if over 60% of global companies use multiple HR systems of record, not all are consolidated into a Global Hub. There are probably not more than 10% that bother to create such a consolidated view via a master data system, the rest do not have any tool to consolidate one way or another.  Yes, your calculation is right: a whopping 50% of global companies cannot report accurately and in real time about key workforce data, let alone ensure data streamlining and reduce duplication.


3. GLOBAL TALENT PROFILE

With the emergence of talent systems, many companies, regardless of whether they have a global HR SOR or Hub in place, have developed another global employee database which focuses on the non-administrative, non-regulatory aspects of the workforce. Such a data repository, usually known as Talent Profile, will focus on the most relevant employee data items in terms of talent processes: basic administrative information, skills, jobs, rating scales, courses etc. You build it by importing the basic admin data from the different source systems, and then are free to build the talent profile as fits your business.

The advantage of such a repository is that, unlike the previous two, it is much less complex to implement. Since they have little regulatory content it is much easier to adopt consistent talent processes across different countries. And for many heads of HR, and especially line managers, the value of a global talent profile may appear as more obvious than a global SOR or hub. There is a trend for companies to build a Talent Profile and then decide a Hub is sufficient, even if they already had a SOR: in that case they prefer to expand the Global HR Hub rather than the HR SOR and limit it to the country/ies where it was already available. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of global HR Systems of Record as we know (knew) them? 

While there is no denying the business value of a Global Talent Profile (just think how the business benefits from the ability to show and offer your high potentials a global career plan in a timely fashion,) relying on a Talent Profile at the exclusion of the other two misses a key point: the two categories (Global HR SOR/Hub and Global Talent) are not interchangeable. The former brings value to senior decision-makers (CEO, VP of HR), the latter to HR managers (recruiters, trainers etc.) and line managers. As such they are both part and parcel of a true HR management system. In some cases it may make sense to put in place a Talent Profile  before a modern consolidated HR system; sometimes that would feel like putting the ox before the cart. In all cases, it is a grievous mistake to consider that with one, especially a Talent Profile, one can skip on the other. Do that and you look at your business the way a one-eyed person looks at the world.

Whatever approach you use, a single view of your workforce/talent data brings advantages which cannot be realized without a good data governance model in place. Always remember the GIGA principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Many of my clients call me for help complaining about their software vendor's shortcomings when the issue lies squarely with the users. For instance, you'll find users in different subsidiaries that are reluctant to use the system because the data is obsolete or doesn't reflect reality ("Oh dear, but we haven't used those job codes in years:") Well, whose fault is it? Have you communicated this information to the corporate HRIS team? Is there an HRIS manager/coordinator in the first place? Do they solicit feedback from local users? Have they involved them in the design of the global system?

All these questions will determine the success of a global HR system, whether it is a Talent Profile, a Data Hub or an HR System of Record. Those who have worked with me know that I have zero tolerance for, and am quite vocal about, vendors who over-promise, under-deliver and build crappy products. But that does not mean that HR leaders and users can hide behind that to shirk their responsibilities. After all, your HR system is YOUR tool, it is about YOUR people, YOUR company. It is therefore YOUR duty to do the required due diligence and ensure you have the best system to meet your company's requirements. It is nobody else's responsibility.

NOTE: In order not to overload the graphs I have simplified them. Thus, the interfaces are all shown as one-way to reflect the more important flow direction, even though some (for instance between Payroll and HR) is often a two-way flow (to update compensation data following payroll processes.) Also, interfaces can be much messier than what appears, with payroll interfaced with a third-party system (such as a Benefits provider.)  And in the case of companies that do not use either a Hub or a SOR, point-to-point interfaces will make the graphs (and the reality behind them) even clunkier. But all these deviations do not detract from the best practice tips offered in the post.

FOR SALE: Software firm HR Access going on the block

PARIS

You will not see the following ad in the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal, or any IT trade publication, but you might as well. After almost 10 years trying to shape HR Access into an outfit to serve its changing purposes, investment firm Fidelity is throwing in the towel. The software company it bought in 2003 from IBM is up for sale.

I discussed in an April 2010 post ("Is Fidelity Still in the HR Services Business?") some of the recurring problems faced by HR Access and I predicted that Fidelity would sell off the company. Two years on the problems haven't been solved and Fidelity is now actively looking for a buyer to divest itself of what has turned into a failed venture. Its dream of ever recovering the staggering amounts it has plowed into the French company are unlikely to ever materialize.

So, who is the likely buyer?

- Payroll outsourcing giant ADP could be interested (rumor has it that it did express some interest.) It has experience buying European payroll providers: as recently as 2010 it bought Logica's payroll business in the Netherlands and Italy's payroll leader, Byte. HR Access will help it expand its market share in countries where it is already a leader. But being a leader in the markets where HR Access is strong may not constitute a big incentive for them, unless the price is particularly attractive.

- SAP is also a leader in France and Italy, but less so in the payroll business. And since PeopleSoft is still strong in France, the acquisition could strengthen its hand. The fact that both SAP and HR Access have one of the largest employers in Europe as a customer (the French government - SAP for HR and HR Access for Payroll), this could be a good opportunity to consolidate both into one single project and offering. And as a European company, the cultural fit may be closer than ADP (or Fidelity for that matter.)

- Meta4 could do well with HR Access's customer base especially since they operate in the same geographies. However, Meta4 (whose business has been as stagnant as HR Access) is going through a bad patch now, so any merger would be a case of the broke leading the broke. Or Sopra, one of the top French IT services company with a well-known HR product, Pléiades.

- One cannot rule out Oracle, the serial acquirer if there ever was one. But with Oracle's focus on the cloud/SaaS business, HR Access may be too small to feature on its radar. 

- What about the various private-equity firms that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars recently acquiring HR companies? Maybe legendary KKR, owner of fellow European Northgate Arinso, could see the opportunity to increase its  market share in key European countries. Sure, that means adding  one more product (and many versions of it, to boot) but NGA's portfolio is already so large that managing a couple of additional products should not change much.

Hopefully HRA 9 is better localized than their season's greetings
(as seen on  their website on Jan. 3, 2013)

- Anybody else?

Whoever makes the move better have a good strategy in place AND ensure execution follows through, otherwise it will be yet another case in the software industry of throwing good investment money after bad.  

Notes from a good conference in a tacky town

Can you tell the original one (which I can
see from my Paris home) from the fake one
which graced the view from my Mandalay
Bay hotel room? 

LAS VEGAS

In my book High-Tech Planet  I called a chapter “The tackiest town on earth” because most of the action took place in Dubai.  Now that I have been to Las Vegas I have to revise my judgment: Sin City wins top honors (at least the runner up for the title has the Persian Gulf as an exotic background.) Thankfully I was too busy inside the Mandalay Bay Hotel complex with the 14^th HR Technology Conference  to  wonder  about the meaning (if any) of creating a surreal city in the middle of the desert  or, to make an easy pun, wander about either.

One of the most eagerly awaited presentations was SAP’s debuting of its SaaS offering, Career On-Demand, the German software company’s reply to the smaller talent management vendors who have been eating its lunch in that market segment for the past half decade (but not available until Apr. 2012.)  Although there was no doubt that its user experience was an improvement on R/3 (in itself not an insurmountable task), I felt underwhelmed by what I saw. Even the Fusion features which Oracle demoed at its booth looked better. (By the way, anybody saw  the many Vegas cabs sporting “Oracle-#1 HCM” ads?) The LinkedIn import function in the new SAP product is good (but then other talent management vendors already offer it.) SAP is still playing catch up and it shows.  On the last day, Merck  explained in their presentation why they decided on Lumesse’s ETWeb system for their  100,000- strong merged companies’ performance management rather than SAP which they use as their HR system of record. Nothing I have seen so far is going to reverse the trend.

Speaking of Lumesse, on Day 1 of the conference, they announced their acquisition of Edvantage, a Norway-based Learning  vendor (acquisisition #11  this year in my count.) This makes them the fifth talent management -TM) vendor to offer the full gamut of TM functions, and so far the only European vendor to do so. Another European vendor that attracted quite some attention was Meta4 which many people had already buried regarding the American market, and who is staging a comeback, or at least attempt #2. Considering  their strengths there are few vendors who really deserve to  succeed the second time round in the land of the second chance.

Workday was again the vendor that attracted the most attention. Unsure, though, whether that was due to the fun dance they performed in their booth. In my two decades in the HR system business I  sure never thought that software updates  would make great lyrics nor make bodies gyrate to a catchy tune. (You can watch here the video.)  Their announcement of an alliance with NorthgateArinso (NGA) on multi-country payrolls was of more direct consequence to our business, though. Since many global customers are hesitating whether  to replace their current HCM vendor with one that only covers two countries, and all of them in North America, this alliance was only a question of time before it was announced. After all, the only other possible suitors were Oracle or SAP, direct competitors to Workday. NGA is a good compromise: its SAP-based offering (whether hosted, on-premise or outsourced) offers more  payroll localizations than any other vendor and the only issue now is the extent to which either vendor offers a decent out-of-the box connector to the other’s product (HR admin for Workday and the various payrolls for NGA).  Let’s watch closely how their first joint customer AIG fares under this arrangement.


I was more than gratified by the 100-120 who attended my session on Expanding to Europe. Based on the number of HR executives who came to talk to me or contacted me afterwards, going global is increasingly becoming  part and parcel of many HR projects. 

No HR  Technology Conference is complete without the vendor-sponsored parties. In spite of my 9-hour jetlag, I managed to drag myself to some of them on Monday night. I found the SilkRoad party quite cool, and the Cornerstone one friendly and fun (and quite young –some of their executives were not even born when some major products were launched.) I passed on the late evening’s big bash since by then all life had deserted me, and I barely managed to crawl back to my room.  

One last word on the location: in comparison with Chicago the facilities were better, and the fact that we could stay on the premises was an advantage. On the down side, the Mandalay Bay has all the charm of a crowded mall, with the most dreadful hotel-elevator experience I have ever had (one day there was a long line stretching back into the lobby.) And, of course, Chicago is an amazing place with great architecture, culture and a true lake to breathe some fresh air. It is also more easily reachable for most US-based attendees and even more so for the many Europeans who came. After this interesting experiment in Sin City I definitely vote for the conference to go back to the Windy City. 


(The original Eiffel Tower is the one on the left-hand side.) 

2010-2011: Two momentous years of consolidation in the HR space

PARIS
My interest and experience in M&A activities in the HR services and technology space go back to Oracle's long, hostile and headline-grabbing acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2003. I was involved in the transaction, especially with the preparation of the case before the European Commission which had tried to block the acquisition on anti-trust grounds. (For those interested, this episode was the inspiration for some chapters in my book, High-Tech Planet: Secrets of an IT Road Warrior.)

Small wonder then that since I went solo two years ago I have been asked to track the mating rituals of the companies that make up the supply side of our profession and some of my findings can be found here. Sure, we are still a quarter shy of the end of 2011 and many choice morsels have already been gobbled up and are being digested. But, after the summer lull, there could well be some interesting activity, as evidenced by last week's acquisition by ADP of Asparity Decision Solutions. After all, many software companies are awash with cash and the stockmarket drubbing we are seeing means that many target companies are particularly inexpensive. This being said I do not expect any new acquisitions through the end of the year to significantly alter my findings. Should that happen, I would post an update in January.

Data and methodology
I have tracked all the acquisitions in the HR services and software industry since January 2010 where either the acquiring company or the target were based in the United States or in Europe (the only exception was SuccessFactors' purchase of Australia's Inform.) Although I also have data on other regions of the world, I have restricted myself to these two regions since they represent the lion's share of the worldwide HCM  market and M&A activity. The number of such deals was a neat 25, until ADP's latest move last week.

The first, general, comment that one can make is the surprising lack of any hostile operation. Apart from UK-based Sage and Dutch-based Unit4 slugging it out in early 2010 for the control of Polish ERP/HR vendor Teta, all acquisitions have been consensual affairs. The nasty PeopleSoft takeover by Oracle seems to be a thing of the past.

The average number of deals has been at least one per month (reaching in April 2011 a high-water mark with no less than 4 acquisitions announced in the same month, two of them by SuccessFactors). For this year we are already reaching 11 deals for just 9 months.

HR vendors are heeding Cole Porter's famous song Let's Do It and almost everybody is getting in on the act. Some, though, seem to relish it more than others especially SuccessFactors (2010's first acquisition was also the company's first in its history) and ADP. Apart from the latter, all are talent management vendors, providing further proof if necessary that this is still the hottest HCM market segment. (Actually some of ADP's transactions were aimed squarely at the talent management space.)

Number of acquisitions by vendor, 2010-2011
Source: Ahmed Limam

As befits the size of its home market, US companies are by far the most likely to engage in takeovers: 88% of the 26 acquisitions originated from a US-based corporation. However, when one looks at the nationality of target companies, European vendors are more likely to engage in cross-border acquisitions than their American counterparts, even if those are still in Europe (the only American company acquired by a European vendor in this period was Convergys by UK-based NorthgateArinso.) Of course, in absolute terms there are more European companies bought by US vendors than non-national companies by European acquirers (ADP and SuccessFactors with 3 and 2 cross-border purchases respectively are the most global of acquirers.)

A worrying development, probably due to the uncertain economic climate in 2011, this year has so far seen only 2 cross-border acquisitions versus 7 in 2010 which is hard to understand: the dollar may be weaker than many other currencies, but then it means that any investment will pay off handsomely and faster since the revenue will be booked in the stronger target company's currency. So why are American vendors so reluctant to engage in cross-border acquisitions? I can think of several European vendors who are just waiting to be snapped up, providing the acquiring company with, if not cutting-edge technology, at least a large market share and steady revenue stream. Asia and South America also have strongly established HR vendors who, in their fast growing markets, can deliver returns US (and European) companies are no longer used to.

A closer look at the average deal size shows little impact of the financial crisis, though. On the contrary, when we remove the unusually high value of Aon's Hewitt acquisition ($4.9 bn) which would skew the results and the transactions that included HR but went beyond (such as Infor's purchase of Lawson) we find that the average deal value almost doubled up from $66 mn in 2011 to $117mn. Two caveats are in order: many vendors (such as ADP) do not disclose the financial terms of their transactions and the 2011 figure is boosted by the $290 mn value of the SuccessFactors-Plateau linkup (other disclosed deals were way below the $100 mn mark.) The last quarter's performance will be crucial in either confirming this trend or reversing it.

Deals include ERP transactions where HR was one component
but undisclosed deals are not included.
Source: Ahmed Limam 

Looking at the scope of the M&A transactions, we find that the three most  popular HR areas or processes covered are: analytics, learning and core HR. The first two reflect talent management vendors expanding their offering from their niche offering to the full gamut of TM, while the latter (Core HR) shows that some talent management vendors are moving up the value chain and want to be considered as full-fledged HCM vendors. For comparative purposes I have separated out the various components of the talent management function: otherwise the TM function represents almost half of the full scope.

Source: Ahmed Limam

Finally, I found it worthwhile to study the rationale for the M&A activities. My definition may well be controversial since there are always several reasons why a vendor decides to go down the acquisition route rather than the organic one, and I may not necessarily share the official reasons offered or I may give them a different weight.  There are usually five main reasons which of course tend to overlap (when ADP bought Byte in Italy last November  it was to increase its European footprint at the same time as increase its number of customers in a key outsourcing market.)

1. to deepen vendor's offering: I include intelligence and social here, since these are not separate HR domains
2. to broaden it: case of Taleo buying Learn.com to add a new HR function which it did not have
3. to expand a vendor's country footprint (globalize)
4. to go full HR: I am including here private equity firms or ERP vendors wanting to expand their portfolio
5. to increase market share/customer base.

Major reasons for vendors to
acquire another HR vendor.
Source: Ahmed Limam

As the following graph shows, vendors are first and foremost interested in deepening their offering, that is adding higher-value features to their products, before broadening it. With one out of three deals involving two separate countries, it is hardly surprising that the second most important reason is to expand abroad. Although its pace is slowing down in 2011, globalization is still an unmistakable fact of the HR market and will continue in 2012. The question is whether it will be as strong as in 2010 or rather along the lines of 2011.

Another interesting question about 2012 has to do with Workday. Will the most scrutinized of HR vendors finally decide to enter the M&A fray (with the help of its freshly minted IPO) to buy its way into the recruiting or learning space or will it continue to look disdainfully on the whole exercize and carry on with its organic-growth strategy?


(Ahmed Limam will be in Las Vegas next week to attend the HR Technology Conference where he will present a session comparing  the US and Europe in terms of HR and technology.)