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Part - III

The Market For HRIS Projects

This section tries to explain how a normal software development/ maintenance project is different from an HRIS project. When an Indian software firm, say Wipro Infotech, bags a software development project from say, British Airways, it is likely to start with the requirements analysis through to implementation and maintenance. It will do requirements analysis, design, coding, testing, implementation and maintenance. Wipro in this case is developing software that meets a particular automation requirement of British Airways. However, if Wipro were to bag a project for automating British Airways' HR systems, then the situation is likely to be a little different.

When British Airways decides that it has to automate its HR function, it will start off with an analysis of its existing HR processes, decide on its requirements and then chose between the option of either building the software in-house or outsourcing it to an IT firm. Most of the firms do not go for an in-house ERP implementation because building software is not their core-competence and also because of the huge financial implications. In most cases, these firms decide on purchasing an ERP product available in the market.

This is where the enterprise applications market is different from the software development market. In this case, the clients normally decide on a particular product and then the IT firms move in to configure and customize it to suit the clients' business requirements. Various ERP products are available in the market available in separate modules for HR, marketing, production, sales and distribution, accounting and finance. Some of the notable products include those from SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards (PeopleSoft recently bought an 80% stake in JD Edwards), Oracle and Navision.

Now different business organizations have different business processes, so how do these ERP products take care of the varying business needs of these organizations? The answer lies in what are called the 'best business practices'. For example, while designing its HRIS package, SAP would study the best practices prevalent in HR across organizations. The software is then built according to these best practices. Hence, largely, an HRIS package would address the typical business needs of HR for an organization.

The choice of a particular HRIS package would then depend on how closely that product matches the business processes of the client organization. Once a particular HRIS product is purchased by an organization, it will then be customized to take care of the specific business needs of that organization.

Thus, in case of an HRIS project, the IT firms basically deal in customization and post-implementation services. The following section discusses the three main stages in an HRIS project, namely, pre-implementation stage, the implementation stage and the post-implementation stage.

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* Contributed by -
Rupam Das,
The Media Cell.
XIM Bhubaneswar.