Is your bench empty?

FinancialForce.com Peoplecasting™ is the ERP company’s latest release and provides the glue between CRM(Customer Relationship Management), PSA(Professional Services Automation) and HCM(Human Capital Management). The product was announced at the HR Technology Conference and/or Technology Services World being held in Las Vegas this week.

FinancialForce.com Peoplecasting:Human Resource Planning

The new product delivers solutions to several problems that companies face and is able to do so partly because all of the data is held in a single source within Salesforce.com. In some ways it is surprising that this link up has not been done before when the original products were being created. Within the FinancialForce.com application is it now possible to consider resource planning taking in several new elements such as absences from HCM and customer requirements from CRM.

Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce.com commenting in the press release said: “This announcement is a great example of the synergy that can be achieved when business applications reside on a single cloud platform.

“Our view is that HCM applications should be integral to operations and part of the business fabric, unlike other applications that are completely disconnected from other ERP or CRM applications. This single cloud approach will also allow us to extend Peoplecasting™ to predictive analytics for talent management.

For example, we can recognize patterns of top performers by triangulating employee information with operational information on sales orders from CRM, project success from PSA or customer profitability from financial management applications depending on the role of the employee. This will help companies make better recruiting and management decisions and make a significant difference to the bottom line.”

FinancialForce.com Peoplecasting: PSA

That this is an integration between PSA and HCM will bring benefit to those organisations using PSA already. Several customers are apparently already excited by the prospect of linking the two products together. The idea that project leaders can quickly identify whether they have enough people with the right skills to fulfil the potential customer demands is a step beyond what they have been capable of before. HR professionals can now identify potential skills shortages and launch appropriate recruitment and on-boarding processes to ensure that future customer requirements are fulfilled better.

With skills shortages identified benched individuals can spend their time on relevant training for the future as demand curves fluctuate and skills shortages are identified. The intention is to bring the manufacturing JIT (Just In Time) methodology into professional services.

Absence management is also one of the features that has been integrated between the two platforms. It is perhaps surprising that this had not been previously done as it will help with the resource management for projects. The new solution appears to ensure that one data set is looked at by both modules, meaning that once new hires are on-boarded they are available to all project managers. This is key for multi-site organisations who will often not be aware of the new hires and their availability.

Alan Hall, SVP of Information Technology at Jacobus Consulting, a natonwide healthcare consulting firm, was effusive about the new announcement and commented in a canned statement: “For Jacobus Consulting, we believe the integration between FinancialForce HCM and FinancialForce PSA will help our company become more efficient than ever before.

“We’re hyper-focused on achieving what matters most to not only our clients but also our employees and with this new interoperability between apps, we’ll be able to reduce inefficiencies and save a significant amount of resources on previously time-consuming processes. With FinancialForce Peoplecasting™, we are looking forward to not only the time savings and increased user adoption and on-boarding of our FinancialForce ERP apps, but allowing PSA to work with HR to better recruit and on-board the right employees at the right time.”

Conclusion

For many this is what ERP is all about, and some of the new features announced one might have expected within the solution from day 1. Unfortunately there is no announcement about pricing, although it may be included automatically for those customers who purchase both HCM and PSA elements of FinancialForce.com software.

Furthermore there were no details about any migration path to the new functionality. If customers urrently have double entry for absences there will need to be a merging of data. Finally I the announcement of the new functionality there was no date given for its availability.