An HRMS solution that isn’t serving your organization’s needs can create a snowball effect. What happens in the often deadline-driven world of HR and payroll ends up affecting the flow of the entire company. Here are the five most commons ways HRMS systems may be missing the mark on efficiency.

Manual Workarounds
Manual workarounds are a very common way that organizations bridge the gap not only with their HR processes but also in their needs and system capabilities. Sometimes workarounds are created because the system was never fully understood during implementation. In other cases, workarounds are created to accommodate ever-changing business requirements.

Not only do workarounds take up a lot of time, but they also create a large margin of error and can affect a company’s bottom line. For example, overtime could occur every pay period just to get payroll out on time if you don’t have an effective process in place.

Not Understanding the System Functionalities
Systems often have self-service capabilities that are either misunderstood or not used at all. Many functions that would normally be funneled through self-service often get turned over to email communication, and the flow of these emails can be difficult to manage and can turn out to be inaccurate.

Thinking Vendor Support is Inefficient
A common reason that organizations want to replace their current HRMS solution is that they are frustrated with support from their current vendor. Unfortunately, this can be due to misguided expectations. Most vendor support representatives don’t have the detailed expertise that’s specific to an organization’s configurations. Ultimately, system expertise must come from in-house and from someone who is an expert in understanding the capabilities of the system.

Poor Training
Sometimes system issues can be traced back to poor training that started way back in the implementation process and has never been fully resolved. It may be necessary for all users to get additional training so they can better understand the system functionalities.

Systems that Don’t Communicate with Each Other
Organizations often use multiple systems for HR, payroll and accounting/finance to take care of daily operations. If these systems aren’t communicating well with each other, the challenge then becomes maintaining data integrity between these multiple systems. Often, manual workarounds come back into play in the form of emails and spreadsheets in order to combine information into one place. To maintain data integrity, you need one system that can pull data from multiple sources.