Onboarding and Exit processes in an organisation are typically resource intensive, requires coordination between multiple departments, are workflow and checklist based and extremely critical for a positive employee experience. It goes without saying that there is great benefit in automating both onboarding and exit processes and integrating it with the core HCM ERP application. In this regard, it has been extremely surprising for me that PeopleSoft HCM does not deliver a framework that can be used for onboarding employees and managing the exit processes. It pains to see customers resorting to manual onboarding processes even after investing millions in implementing PeopleSoft HCM or building a custom onboarding/exit framework. SMARTERP is one company that has tried to address this deficiency in the PeopleSoft market by developing a bolt-on onboarding framework. You can find details of the product here.
This brings me to Workday. In the latest release of Workday (Workday 16), they have delivered an out of the box onboarding framework. You can read up more on this on Amy Wilson's blog here. All customers of workday can use the new onboarding framework which looks pretty cool from few of the screenshots I have seen. My thumps up to the Workday product development team for addressing a business process that benefits greatly from automation.
The real game changer with SaaS vendors in my mind is the pace at which they 'push out' significant features to customers at no extra cost. Oracle trumpeted the 'Feature Pack' concept few years back as a similar concept - more frequent releases with major functionality improvements. Unfortunately, the definition of both 'frequent' and 'major functionality improvements' differ between a SaaS vendor like Workday and an on-premise vendor like Oracle. The feature packs are released once in a year (compared to 3 to 4 major releases in a year for Workday) and I have not seen any significant functionality changes in any of the feature packs that have been released till now for PeopleSoft HCM. But, this is a topic for another blog post!
Coming back to our original discussion - I sincerely hope that Oracle PeopleSoft HCM Product managers take note of this impending market need for an onboarding and exit framework and introduce this at the latest release possible (That would possibly be 9.3 or some feature packs of 9.2 after it's released in 2013).
