How to Prepare Your Data for HRMS Implementation

In a sense, there is no good time to implement your new HRMS. Some times of the year may be worse than others – for example, performance review season, or year-end for payroll functions – but when you’re looking at taking the personal data of every member of staff and transferring them from one system to another, there really is no good time to do it. And yet it is the HRMS data that is key to the system’s effectiveness. As the old phrase goes, “garbage in, garbage out”; when implementing a new HRMS, it’s important that the data you drop into your shiny new system is not garbage.

Accuracy is an important factor. In any data transfer process, information can become corrupted either through system error or human error – a wrong digit here or deleted detail there and someone either doesn’t get paid that month or perhaps has their pension statement sent to the wrong address. This can be a particular problem when transferring HRMS data from one system to another. The greater the differences between the systems, the greater the potential incompatibilities, and the greater the possible error rate. The goal is for the data in the new HRMS to be at least as accurate as that in the old.

The Foundation of Strategic Insight

This data transfer gives rise to a golden opportunity: to cleanse the employee data before inputting into the new HRMS. This exercise can be part of the stakeholder engagement exercise, asking everyone to personally check their own information. Alternatively, it could be the test exercise for the HRMS employee self-service functionality: requiring everyone to check and, if necessary, update their own record.

HRMS data security is also a fundamental issue; especially if your new HRMS is taking you into the cloud. After all, if you are buying this software as a service (SaaS), the HRMS vendor might well have it installed on the platform as a service(PaaS) from another provider, who might be renting infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from yet another. And the IaaS provider might be using part of a shared data center. If you don’t know where your HRMS data is (although any SaaS vendor should be happy to tell you) then how can you know it’s secure?

The data in your HRMS is the foundation of strategic insights and decisions, of good management, of employee trust in their employer – knowing that it is accurate and secure is essential.