Integration with a Human Resources tool that pulls costs associated with an employee by department or other dimension by named employee

Description

Integration with a Human Resources tool in Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software involves linking the system to a HR/HCM platform, then pulling out employee-based costs with appropriate categories. This automates an otherwise manual process of extracting to CSV, manipulating, and uploading into the CPM tool.

Example Use Case

Scenario: Acme Corporation uses CPM software for financial planning. As part of its operations, it needs to track costs associated with each of its employees by their respective departments and cost drivers.

Solution: By integrating a Human Resources tool, the CPM software can pull the necessary cost data associated with every employee by department. For example, EmployeeID#5000 named as Wile E. Coyote could be linked with the HR tool to retrieve data like salary, benefits, training costs etc. assigned to him. His costs are then loaded into the Marketing department dimension, allowing the Marketing Director to plan around these costs.

Considerations

This functionality is only offered by a small amount of vendors due to the complexity of integrating with an HR tool, and the sheer amount of HR tools on the market. The products that do have it are offering a critical service by saving hours per month otherwise spent extracting, manipulating, mapping, and troubleshooting uploads. This is especially true for organizations where headcount is the largest expense.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

• Our HR Tool: We have HR / HCM / Payroll tool X. What type of automated integration to that tool do you offer natively? If you don't, is this something that can be configured?
• Available Data: For the sake of planning, which drivers can be populated by the integration? Can we expect planned merit increases, 401k contributions and so on to be loaded in?
• Existing CPM Data: How does the system reconcile uploaded data with what already exists in the planning tool such as existing employee records?