The hidden cost of inconsistent employee master data, and how to avoid it.
Practical advice to avoid common traps within your HR-software landscape.
Your employee master data is both sensitive and valuable. Yet in our experience, many HR Departments do not have complete control of it, with missing or incorrect employee records creating costs and risk for the organization.
The good news is that you can reduce these costs and risks with some relatively simple steps.
Data security risk
Employee records need to be entered into systems owned by different departments. We often see sensitive personal data being sent by email from one team to another, creating an obvious risk of data breach. Additionally, when an employee is offboarded, their software licenses and access to systems should be revoked, which is typically the responsibility of IT Operations. However, it is easy for busy HR Teams to not follow up, with the result that licenses are not revoked, and accounts remain accessible, creating another GDPR and data security risk.
FIX: Integrating your Identity Management System with your Master HRM software enables many onboarding and offboarding processes to be automated and transferring sensitive records in a secure environment, saving your team and IT Operations time, and minimizing the data security risk.
Overpaying for software licenses
Unfortunately, the cost of inaccurate master data is linear with the number of incorrect entries: the cost of an unused license multiplied by the number of users that should have been disabled. This is a direct cost which can be significant in large organizations.
FIX: Integrating your Identity Management System with your Master HRM software ensures unnecessary third-party software licenses can be flagged and ideally cancelled, saving your organization from overpaying for unused license fees.
Time spent entering data
Manually entering data into several different applications is time consuming, and if some of the data is common to multiple systems, it is also very inefficient. If that same data is entered by people using systems in other parts of the business, the problem only multiplies.
The more systems used within a HR Department, the greater this cost is. For example, your team may be entering data from a Recruitment application into your Master HRM software, then into a Workforce Management and Payroll software. Many sophisticated organizations also use Employee Satisfaction tools or Learning Management Software, not to mention IT Operations updating your Identity Management System and your Finance team needing to get records from Payroll into their ERP.
FIX: Each of these processes consumes unnecessary time and increases the likelihood of inaccurate or incomplete employee records. By connecting these systems together, you save valuable time across multiple teams and gain efficiency through automated business processes. Not to mention, the unquestionable benefits of having better data available for faster decision-making.
Time spent correcting issues
Inaccurate master data can create problems including access to systems, payroll, scheduling shift work and more. These mistakes need to be corrected, taking time from the HR team, line managers, the Payroll, Finance and IT departments, and of course, the employees’ time.
FIX: As above, when records are manually entered into multiple software, errors are almost inevitable. By connecting these systems, you save valuable time by ensuring the correct data only needs to be entered once and it then flows seamlessly to other systems using the same records.
Employee frustration
If an employee is not able to correctly enter their work shifts, access systems they need, or experience errors in their pay slip, this can create a lot of frustration, resulting in lower employee satisfaction throughout the organization. We have also seen examples where shifts were not registered due to manual entry errors, resulting in less delivery drivers being rostered and less frontline workers on the shop floor costing sales and unsatisfied customers.
FIX: Simply by connecting your Master HRM software to the other software the organization relies on you can immediately and affordably avoid unnecessary employee and customer frustration.
Distracting your HR team from strategic initiatives
Most sophisticated organizations understand the value of their employees, with the HR team tasked to drive strategic value from their human capital. If the (very busy) HR team are occupied fixing administrative errors, their capacity to contribute strategic value is diminished.
FIX: As above, and especially in times when your already busy HR team is overworked, automating manual tasks helps free time for you to contribute even more value to the organization.
At CMA, our integration platform, Canvas, orchestrates thousands of data exchanges, moving people data between an array of different HR-apps. You can build and maintain your own integrations using the iPaaS, or you can have our team of experts manage everything for you.
We have over a decade’s worth of integration experience, are ISO27001 certified, and provide services to large organisations throughout Europe, such as McDonald’s, DeutschePost, Stepstone, and more.
