In today's corporate environment, the Human Resource Management (HRM) has been recognized as one of the major business functions. In most organizations, the HR departments and their people are assuming the lead roles in formulating the corporate policies and strategies, apart from addressing the workforce acquisition, performance and developmental needs of the firm. However, in today's web-speed economy, HR professionals and their departments can emerge successful only when they perform their roles quickly and efficiently. Hence they require the ability to instantly access HR information and process HR tasks efficiently, which is gained through the automation of HR related information and processes. Till recently, HR professionals in several organizations were much dependent on paper work for various HR functional activities such as payroll administration, recruitment, etc. But, today a prevalence of integrated processes supported by information technologies have brought about a significant change in the ways the HR practitioners are performing their roles. Such a revolution in HR is due to the adoption of technology-enabled HR management practices leveraging solutions like Human Resource Management System (HRMS).
HRMS,
also referred to as Human Resource Information System (HRIS) in the early information
age, was considered as a database system that helped HR executives to keep track
of all kinds of information related to their organization and employees. From
being a simple database meant for recording and tracking employee data, today
HR systems have matured as an integrated software application/system. In conventional
practice, each HR function was automated separately, ultimately creating a set
of programs/applications supported by islands of employee databases. However,
the emergence of HRMS software as an integrated application has brought a paradigm
shift in the technology practice of HR to effectively manage a wide range of HR
processes/functions. Very often, such a system is developed by integrating all
the HR functional programs through a centralized database system, while offering
a common interface to all its users. |