Recently I was renting a car from a company well known for customer service. The desk, usually staffed by four attendants, had been replaced by four self-service kiosks. So far, so good: no lines at the kiosks, and having been trained by highly optimized self-service experiences at Amazon, Orbitz, and others, I expected to be on my way in minutes, or even seconds. But when I tried to rent my car, the experience didn’t work for me. Maybe my member number was wrong, or the credit card on file was out of date– I’m not sure what the problem was. As a customer, what I remember is that I was frustrated, and my previously “sticky” relationship with that company isn’t so sticky any more.
I bring this up because it shows how tricky self-service applications can be. Cost cutting is the new reality of business. As large companies continue to try to do more with less, HR and other self-service applications are a great way to reduce administrative costs and drive transformation. And most employers have an advantage my rental car company doesn’t have: they can mandate that employees don’t get paid (or promoted, reimbursed etc.) if they don’t use the system.
Better usability goes straight to the bottom line
But “because they have to” isn’t a usability strategy, particularly when employees are used to consumer web services that benefit from literally billions of hours of accumulated user experiences and metrics to sweeten their usability. The cost of poor usability is huge, and in a large enterprise it can really eat away at the bottom line. In an organization with 50,000 employees, if HR self service requires 4 hours of training a year (and that’s a conservative estimate) 200,000 work hours are consumed per year; at $50 an hour that’s a $10 million annual expense. And we haven’t started talking about support, customization, localization and a host of other expenses related to poor usability. When every employee in the enterprise is a user, fixing application usability can, and will significantly improve overall profit.
Our Topaz Bridge S2 customers reap the cost savings of self service without the un-usability tax. We make corporate business processes, starting with SAP HCM, easier to use, so they get used by more employees, with higher satisfaction. We leverage Microsoft SharePoint to deliver HR services as a natural extension of what employees do every day on your corporate intranet, helping you bring down training and support costs.
Preserving SAP governance
We often tell customers that we “don’t break SAP”. What we mean by that is that the HR processes we access are all managed by SAP ERP, so we preserve all aspects of SAP governance: the single system of record, rights and roles and SAP security.
Topaz Bridge S2 customers get the best of both worlds: the same level of usability as modern web applications like Amazon, Facebook, and Linkedin, and governed, auditable, controlled SAP HCM processes. This means that IT can once again be a hero to the entire organization: saving money and improving employee satisfaction.
What you want, when you want it
We also make it easy for business analysts (not J2EE developers!) to configure and extend Topaz Bridge S2 because we take advantage of all the extensive customization features of SharePoint: master layout pages, SharePoint designer, InfoPath forms, Excel Services and more. We even provide more than 100 SAP HCM-aware Web Parts, so you can compose new screens, reports and forms that extend our base functionality to match the needs of your business, locale or workforce. Two huge benefits here- (1) these customizations don’t break your SAP service agreement, because they don’t modify your SAP installation. (2) Analysts can do configuration without developers, so you save a ton of money and get self-service deployed to users in weeks or months rather than years.
How can you get started?
Look at what HR service delivery costs for your company. How much do you spend maintaining the HR database? How accurately is it maintained? How much of that could you delegate to your workforce through a self-service solution?
We assist with this through our Self-Service Rapid Readiness assessment, a 2-4 week process that helps you understand how you’d deploy self service to a global workforce, and identifies risks and risk mitigations strategies to ensure a successful deployment.
The time to start on this is now. Companies that start on this process right away can expect to realize cost savings this calendar year, companies that don’t will spend another year with high-cost, low usability alternatives. Why now indeed. Why wait?
