How Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 helps optimize talent in organizations

If you are like most HR professionals, it’s a challenge to focus on what matters to you most: strategic HR. Managing the day-to-day administrative tasks that employees and managers should be able to take care of  themselves is bogging you down. In my conversations with HR professionals, two of the most time consuming, non-strategic issues they would love to solve are:

• Having multiple, disparate systems to manage talent, which causes frustration and is just plain inefficient
• With so many systems, it’s confusing to employees and managers to know what solution to use to manage their human resource needs

As most already know, Microsoft Dynamics AX is a business solution that supports industry-specific and operational business processes. What you may not be aware of is that Microsoft Dynamics AX includes a single, unified Human Resources solution that encompasses Core Human Resource Management and Talent Management.

Core Human Resource Management:

Centrally manage your workforce across your organization eliminating duplicate data, reducing errors and saving time and money. Core Human Resource Management provides flexible  organization and position structures while tracking historical and future changes across the workforce, enabling streamlined processes such as hiring, transitioning, and off-boarding employees. This includes:

• Personnel Administration - Share workers (employees and contractors), applicants, organizations (e.g. – departments, teams), jobs, positions, and competencies throughout your organization. Retain employment history, track injuries and illnesses, record education, skills, certificates, tests, courses, work experiences, and track loaned equipment.
• Organization Administration - Maintain jobs, positions, and organization structures (hierarchical, matrix, and team-based). Formalize position maintenance with personnel actions and an option of approvals, and also optionally track budget/cost information.
• Benefits Administration - Define benefit plans and assign benefits based on eligibility rules to individual employees or through mass assignment.
• U.S. Payroll - Utilize U.S. Payroll that works seamlessly with HR, Financials, and other components of your Microsoft Dynamics AX solution. Read my prior U.S. Payroll blog to learn more.
• Employee Self-service - Empower employees with the ability to maintain competencies and personal information, apply for jobs, register for courses, maintain performance goals, enter absence requests, view pay statements, and more.
• Manager Self-service – Give managers the ability to manage recruitment projects, approve absences and expenses, and more.
• Business Intelligence & Analytics - Take advantage of a single source of truth for your employee data enabling exceptional decision making with contextual
  analytics.

Talent Management:

Attracting, developing, and retaining the workforce is critical for meeting the dynamic needs of your organization. Talent Management provides a solution to help you manage your most valuable resource. This includes:

• Recruiting - Recruit top talent by posting job openings both internally and externally, and share applicants across the enterprise providing a powerful tool for any recruiter.
• Competency Management - Define competencies for positions and map them to internal and external candidates and employees to ensure the right people are in the right positions.
• Compensation Management - Create fixed and variable compensation plans, which includes grade, band and step compensation structures, which can also be mass adjusted.
• Performance Management - Enable pay for performance based on employee and organizational performance goals.
• Course Management - Offer the ability to initiate learning, define training course information, manage attendee signup lists, waiting list, withdrawals, and also evaluate courses.  

The Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 release includes several improvements that help you manage the talent in your organization

Core Human Resource Management:

• Additional position control when managing and budgeting for positions as well as mass position date-effective updates
• Benefits eligibility control with rules engine so that employees can only be enrolled in benefits for which they are eligible
• Tracking of employee screenings such as drug or medical
• U.S. Payroll that works seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics AX HR and Financials

Talent Management:

• Role-tailored information at your fingertips with enhanced HR role centers
• New tests and qualifications tracking
• Mass adjustments to compensation

With the enhanced HR business processes and capabilities delivered in a single solution, HR professionals can now accomplish more and focus their extra time on strategic HR initiatives. What are the things that keep you up at night relative to Human Resource Management? Are you considering making changes in your organization where you think we may be able to help? I welcome the dialog and any questions you may have about our Human Resource solution.

Dan Schuster - Sr. Product Marketing Manager - Microsoft Dynamics ERP