Every day I have the privilege to meet with senior CIOs, HR Directors, and CFOs at leading organizations. Over the past few years, I’ve followed and participated in numerous IT-transition projects and have seen IT landscapes ranging from those which are fully on-premise to organizations that have successfully transitioned to the cloud.
All executives running large organizations face a great challenge when it comes to cloud transition, especially when it comes to prioritizing which applications to move first as everything cannot be moved at once. The key is, of course, to prioritize the applications where the cloud enables the most value and creates benefits for the business and its employees.
Your Workforce Management applications need to have a high priority in this transition because the underlying process can be greatly improved and transformed in a cloud environment, here’s why:
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Mobile has transformed Workforce Management by enabling employees to be a part of the scheduling process, and you need to have a true cloud solution to deliver a compelling mobile app offering to your end-users. Try connecting mobile apps to your local installations and you’ll soon realize it’s a mess that will eat maintenance and support from your dev team.
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Your Workforce Management application is a company-wide application. Everyone in the organization, ranging from head office to regional managers, unit managers regular employees, and of course also part-timers, will interact with it. Consider in comparison General Ledger which is pretty much a Finance-only application. By moving the WFM application to the cloud interaction from all parts of the organization gets easier.
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Utilizing Big Data to optimize your WFM process has just started to take off. This feature set will be a game-changer that can provide surprising insights that may change the way you run your business. Customers who, for the first time, make a cross-region analysis of their labor data can find very interesting trends. You need to be in the cloud to be able to make this happen.
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Workforce Management is often the first application where employees need to be registered, having it in the cloud enables minute-quick enrollment even in distributed organizations that helps expedite onboarding.
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It’s simply not possible to utilize and schedule resources between regions and units on a solution that has a local database for each unit. When running a large flexible organization this type of feature can save millions.
In summary, if your WFM solution is not already in the cloud, try to move it as soon as possible. Other solutions that need to be prioritized are HR, CRM, and LMS. Solutions that can wait, depending on the architecture, are General Ledger, Invoicing, and Point of Sale.
