5 Easy Steps to Utilizing HRMS Reports in Your Business

HRMS Reports or Management Information (MI) is one of the benefits you can derive from any HRMS these days. In fact, as you have all of your data in a consolidated place, you would be remiss not to fully utilize HRMS reports. So what do you need to consider when developing a strategy for reporting within your HRMS software.

Think About Purpose

First, it is helpful to identify the reasons behind monitoring performance metrics through HRMS reports. Are you expecting to use reports as a means of providing business intelligence outside of Human Resources? Or will reports be used only internally within HR, such as a means to ensure that processes are completed successfully or for audit reasons? It is necessary to define your HRMS strategy then, before starting any other activities.

Identify Your End Users

Once you have identified the purpose of your HRMS reports, it is useful to think about your end users of these reports and the data that they translate. If you’re doing strategic reporting for the business, will you have dedicated reporting analysts who will take any reports and further enhance them outside of the HRMS? Or are your needs more operational within HR so that you will have many local HR users of reporting? Either way, you need to consider training and support for this reporting function. Even the easiest reporting systems will still require super users or data savvy end users who can handle the more complex topics.

Consider the External Impact

As reporting becomes more popular in your organization, you may find that system performance needs to get reviewed, as some reports with heavy processing can often create a user impact. It is also helpful to consider your reporting schedule. Many organizations give a ‘grace period’ for data entry of five days after the end of the month for all entry to occur. Therefore, a new hire report for May will be run on June 5th, for example. Will the length of this grace period effect any other processes which may require this data on a real-time basis.

Clean Up Your Data

A side benefit of HRMS reports will be to highlight data entry gaps or delayed entry. I’ve seen one company where reporting was previously only distributed within a busy HR function. They decided to release self-service manager reporting, and instructed managers to review the data of their direct reports. It resulted in a massive data clean-up, which ultimately was a benefit for the organization, all through this increased visibility via reporting.

Define Security Levels

Once you start to produce reports, you’ll find that they are often distributed far and wide across your organization. It’s important therefore to ensure that you have established appropriate HRMS data handling procedures, in particular where employee personal data is involved.