Oxygen recruits SAP HR expert to lead its New Zealand human capital management practice
Recruited from the United Kingdom, Jason Kiely has taken the role of Practice Manager - Capability Lead, Human Capital Management, and is building up Oxygen’s consulting resources across the SAP human resources (HR), payroll and portal products.
“The aim of the practice is to be very business led,” says Kiely. “While it is easy to proselytise the functional advantages of implementing SAP’s HR and payroll products, realistically organisations need to see that translate into concrete business benefits, such as improved efficiencies and reduced overheads.”
Kiely is currently reviewing the SAP HR market in New Zealand. He says while there is great diversity in the maturity of HR across many businesses, the need for SAP HR is typically split into two camps.
“On one hand, we will be helping companies install SAP from scratch to give them better transactional capability. But we also expect demand from existing SAP HR users who want to move beyond operational advantage, towards delivering improved strategic service to the business.”
He says companies who have no HR systems lack a systemised way of organising employee and payroll data, recruitment procedures and career management information, which causes compliance and reporting problems.
“These types of companies typically run their HR information from spreadsheets which are manually intensive to maintain. Many of them have grown by acquisition and have inherited a variety of different systems, which means there is often a duplication of effort around HR and payroll procedures.”
Kiely says after using SAP HR to improve reporting and compliance, firms then move onto second and third phase deployments, which often include employee self service and manager self service functionality.
“The benefits here are about reducing the amount of administrative duties that HR professionals have to perform. Taking this away allows an organisation to better leverage its HR information and provide a more strategic service to the business.”
Kiely says automating administration tasks so employees can change their own address information and download payslips, allows more time for tackling higher value HR issues. “For example, it can free up HR for in-depth data analysis of its workforce. If an organisation can better develop the careers of its workforce, moving staff up and through the organisation, it can cut recruitment costs significantly.”
A 15-year IT veteran, Kiely has always worked in HR-related management and technology areas. Prior to taking up his Oxygen position he worked for UK SAP partner Diagonal Consulting for 10 years, heading up the HR and finance practice. He has also worked as Head of ERP for another UK SAP partner, Bluefin Solutions.
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