Wonderful news: After 12 years as an independent company, HumanConcepts has been acquired by Saba, based in Redwood Shores, California.
We’re both leaders in helping companies engage, develop and inspire people to transform the way they work and to drive exceptional business results. Combining our strategic organizational planning, talent management, learning, transition management and collaboration expertise will create formidable human capital management synergy.
Our combined organizations will boast more than 2,100 customers. Best of all, joining the Saba family will provide access to their extensive global resources, enabling us to deliver innovative enterprise services to market faster.
Meanwhile, our commitment to our customers and the greater HumanConcepts Community remains clear, unwavering and Priority One. You can expect:
No interruption to current HumanConcepts service, support and development efforts.
Enhanced solutions that drive business agility.
Access to greater industry and technology expertise.
Continued growth of scalable, SaaS-based solution platforms.
Get to know Saba!
They deliver people-centric, cloud-based learning management, talent management, and social enterprise solutions. Their flagship Unified Talent Management Suite includes comprehensive dynamic people profiling, intuitive visual analytics, state-of-the-art talent reviews and calibration, advanced talent pooling and slating, and unification with their industry-leading Enterprise Learning Suite.
Over the coming weeks, we will communicate and detail additional benefits of this acquisition, a great new chapter in the HumanConcepts story. For now, read the official news release here for more reasons why this will transform our industry.
Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Luis Rivera, President
HumanConcepts, a Saba Company
[Note: This post by HumanConcepts Director of Customer Success Rana Hobbs originally appeared on Cornerstone OnDemand's Talent Management Blog.]
How long does it take your organization to ramp up a new department? Or disperse one for that matter? Is the lag between recognizing a business opportunity and aligning the organization to address it impacting your organization’s success?
Agility means an organization can adjust to changing conditions—economic, political and even social—while maintaining business continuity, taking advantage of opportunities and gracefully conducting initiatives without disruption. To achieve true agility, organizations must have two things: accurate information and process.
Information is only valuable if it’s correct and if it’s strategically important to the organization. Collecting and acting on data related to critical risk areas for your organization is much more effective than gathering data on all potential risks, then attempting to make sense of that information. Also important is the ability to assimilate all data sources—ERP, talent, spreadsheets and internal systems—in one place in order to form complete and accurate insights. A holistic view of the organization allows organizations to spend more time acting on their data via analysis and planning instead of spending time searching for and validating it.
The second part of agility—process—enables organizations to function like a well-oiled machine. With accurate information in hand, key stakeholders are able to plan for the future—whether it may bring the closing of a department, an opening of a new call center, or shortages in critical talent. Having a process in place to plan how your organization would best adapt in light of these events saves time and money, and enables quick reaction to change.
A vital part of this process is organizational planning, a mechanism used to create and maintain an ideal organization. Organizational planning is the process of defining the org structure necessary to execute on business strategy. It might include scenario-planning, viewing budget requirements and adjustments, deciding what roles need to be filled, created or terminated, as well as looking to the future and planning for what roles will be needed a few years down the road, what sector of the business will grow the fastest or what external factors will affect your business today and in the future.
Having a process and being able to plan for organizational change may seem odd at first. How can you plan for changes that are as yet unknown? When you look at the key decisions involved in organizational change—hiring, firing, promoting, moving, growing, etc.— the major obstacle to agility is the mere process of collecting, analyzing, reviewing, approving and distributing a set of changes within an organization’s data set. Once all information is in accessible and process is defined, planning can become a routine management discipline.
In fact, in a recent research study conducted by the Human Capital Institute, strategic planning within organizations has been directly linked to:
Improved employee engagement
Revising business strategy less often
Improved profitability
Ability to take on more business
These results show that strategic planning and agility go hand-in-hand, together a best practice for any organization that wants to stay ahead of the curve.
Note: To learn more about the HCI Research study as well as organizational planning and agility, catch up with HumanConcepts at the Cornerstone OnDemand Talent Leadership Forum roadshow, hitting the road in March for a four-city tour. View the calendar and registration details here.
Agenda-wise, check out the Workforce Analytics & Planning, HCM and Workforce Management sessions calendar here. Hot Pick: HCM3: SAP Debuts Its Next Generation HCM Solutionson Tuesday, Oct. 4, from 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Here’s the abstract:
Last year’s most popular breakout featured Oracle’s next generation Fusion HCM. Now it’s SAP’s turn to debut publicly its own next generation HCM solutions with Web 2.0 and social media at their foundation. Built on SAP’s new Business ByDesign technical platform and delivered on-demand via SaaS, they are designed to integrate with SAP’s installed on-premise systems—or any others. But the company’s installed base of HRMS customers is the largest in the world, according to IDC. David Ludlow, the head of HCM product strategy for almost 10 years and a veteran of six of our former Shootouts, will show you his new software: Performance Management, Career Development and embedded Collaboration. Available to early customers at the end of this year, general availability is scheduled for the first quarter of 2012. Co-chair Bill Kutik will ask him questions, and so can you.
Seeing is believing, too, as a newly minted series of instructional videos—spotlighting HR data visualization, workforce analysis and planning, org charting, and PowerPoint publishing—on our YouTube channel illustrates.
Tech Tip: For optimal viewing, watch the videos in their original perspective directly on YouTube.
HR Data Visualization Quick Tour (Part 1)
Summary: This first video in a two-part series gives you a quick tour of how HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite allows you to easily visualize your HR Data. Features include selecting the chart view (to view different fields in the chart), navigating the chart, viewing and comparing employee profiles, searching for employees and finding them in the chart, changing the number of levels in a chart, and printing a chart.
HR Data Visualization Quick Tour (Part 2)
Summary: This second video in a two-part series continues the quick tour of how HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite allows you to easily visualize your HR Data. Features include using conditional formats and formulas to analyze employee metrics and workforce statistics, navigating the organizational hierarchy using the org tree, exporting a chart to Excel, publishing a chart to PDF, using split-screen mode, and switching hierarchies to view alternate reporting relationships.
Workforce Analysis Quick Tour
Summary: This video provides a quick demonstration of how managers and HR professionals can use HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite for workforce analysis. In the first scenario, key performance indicators are analyzed to improve group productivity. In the next scenario, span of control metrics are analyzed to reduce management costs. In third scenario, diversity ratios are analyzed to correct imbalances following an organizational restructuring.
User Org Charting Quick Tour
Summary: This video demonstrates how HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite allows you to customize charts for meetings and presentations. You can control which fields are displayed in chart boxes. With HumanConcepts Plan & Model, you can add, move, delete and edit chart boxes to model the future state of an organization.
Workforce Planning Quick Tour
Summary: This video demonstrates how managers can use HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite to create, share and collaborate on departmental plans. In the featured scenario, a manager is directed to create a new function within her department. The manager creates a new plan and then shares it with her supervisor. The supervisor certifies the plan, using track changes to review and set effective dates for each change. The HR administrator completes the plan by exporting the changes to the core HR system.
Publishing to PowerPoint
Summary: Produce boardroom-quality presentations using HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite by publishing your organizational charts to PowerPoint. This short video demonstrates how to specify the contents of a chart to be published, and how to optionally include a cover page, table of contents and index. In PowerPoint slide show mode, clicking on live sub-chart arrows allows you to present your organization by visually navigating the chart hierarchy.
New SaaS Platform for Managing Organizational Change Enables Workforce Visualization, Analytics, Planning and Modeling to Support Agility
Sausalito, CA—June 30, 2011—HumanConcepts today announced the HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite, a new platform for HR data visualization and analytics, and for managing organizational change. The Organizational Planning Suite meets enterprise-level demand for a flexible, secure solution that provides comprehensive organizational insight and the tools for implementing change decisions. The new platform features a brand new, user-configurable interface for advanced organizational charting, visual corporate directories, hierarchy-based analytics and workforce planning capabilities. With the visually rich, intuitive interface, organizational data can now be deployed easily to HR managers, business leaders and executives for collaborative analysis, planning, modeling and workforce decision support; as well as to employees for access to contextual workforce information.
“Organizations need to be able to adapt quickly to changing business conditions. The HumanConcepts Suite provides the data, insight, tools and collaboration environment businesses need to rapidly manage structural changes and align the organization with evolving business strategies,” said Martin Sacks, CEO of HumanConcepts. “After listening to hundreds of customers and investing millions in development, we believe this new platform represents a significant step forward in helping business managers and HR specialists optimize their business processes around organizational change. Whether planning a new business initiative or departmental reorganization, or managing a global merger, the HumanConcepts Suite provides a secure, collaborative platform for building and transitioning to the future state of the organization.”
The new HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite contains fully integrated modules engineered to provide clients a seamless end-to-end experience, including:
Visualize: Access and share up-to-date organizational charts to increase understanding, communicate structure and provide a basis for decision making.
Connect: Provide secure, company-wide access to corporate directories and org charts through seamless portal integration and mobile devices.
Archive: Access point-in-time org charts to mitigate legal and regulatory risks and conduct trend analysis.
Maintain: Improve overall quality of employee and hierarchy data and exponentially increase its value.
Plan & Model: Increase organizational agility with a streamlined, collaborative process to manage ongoing workforce planning, reorganizations and major events such as mergers and acquisitions.
Succession: Reduce risk with a practical solution for creating succession plans within the familiar context of the organizational chart.
Analytics: Identify organizational risks and opportunities using an intuitive analytics dashboard.
Transition: Increase agility by reducing time, cost and risk of ongoing or event-based employee separations and redeployments.
The HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite can combine data from talent, HCM, ERP and other applications to create rich information within the familiar visual paradigm of the org chart. “Increasing transparency of information can have real business impact daily and in times of change and reorganization, yet many organizations battle to manage organizational data in traditional HRMS systems,” said Thomas Otter, Gartner Group Research Vice President. “Gartner sees a strong demand for solutions that deliver organizational data and insight in an easy-to-use and visually compelling way.”
The HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite is delivered as a 100 percent web-based, SaaS solution and as a traditional on-premise application. The SaaS option eases implementation and reduces administrative overhead as well as total cost of ownership. With a true SaaS solution, customers will benefit from instant access to upgrades and new capabilities along with ongoing product performance tuning. Full system administration can be performed from anywhere on the network via a web browser.
New capabilities of the HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite include:
New User Experience—elegantly designed to put more control in the hands of users, accelerating insight and problem solving. Features baseball cards for side-by-side comparison, split-screen views, broad browser compatibility and much more.
New Next-Generation Publishing—create boardroom-quality PDF and PowerPoint documents. End users now have unprecedented control over output including dynamic show/hide of fields and the ability to edit in real time prior to publish or print.
*New Next-Generation Plan & Model—offering improved “what if” organizational scenario planning. Features drag-and-drop planning, change tracking, plan synchronization, sharing and workflow to facilitate small to large reorganizations.
New Portal and Mobile Access—delivering anytime, anywhere information. Integration with SharePoint and other corporate portals as well as native mobile applications allow users at work, at home, or on the road to access critical organizational data.
Fully Customizable Analytics—enabling quick, intuitive access to an infinite number of views combining information from any system including talent, budgeting, learning, ERP, HCM and more. Highlighted with colors, outlines and visual cues, key information is readily visible so users can easily identify and address workforce issues.
VISUALIZING THE WORKFORCE: New HumanConcepts Visualize is part of the new HumanConcepts Organizational Planning Suite, which also includes Connect, Archive, Maintain, Plan & Model, Succession, Analytics and Transition modules.
Adds HumanConcepts customer Maynor Venegas, Director HRIS at Zimmer, “We were so impressed with the new version that we are looking forward to becoming early adopters and making it available to our managers.”
For more information, please go to www.humanconcepts.com, or register for an upcoming webinar on July 13, 1 p.m. EDT/10 a.m. PDT.
About HumanConcepts
HumanConcepts enables enterprises to better manage organizational change of all types, including growth, rightsizing and reorganization. Using solutions from HumanConcepts, customers can achieve organization agility, more easily understand how they are organized, plan for the future, and transition the workforce to its optimal state. Used by many of the world’s largest organizations, HumanConcepts solutions provide immediate return on investment by enabling companies to reorganize faster, manage financial targets, stay in compliance, and reduce both cost and risk. The company’s products are certified by leading ERP and talent vendors such as Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft and Lawson. HumanConcepts is based in Sausalito, California, with offices in the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore. For more information, visit http://www.humanconcepts.com.
Here’s a spring round-up of recent HumanConcepts research, analysis and coverage, validating the growing importance of workforce visualization, analytics and organizational change management.
HR Data Visualization
IHRIM chairman Nov Omana’sHR Data Visualization: The Power to See, Plan, Act in Collective HR Solutions discusses how workforce visualization leads to a more agile organization and enables business alignment. “I have seen this done admirably by… OrgPlus Enterprise,” he says. Read it here.
Making the Right Moves
Meanwhile, another reminder that IHRIM’s online Workforce Solutions Review recently published an article, Developing the Ideal Organization: Making the Right Moves, written by our CEO, Martin Sacks. Martin explains why organizational optimization, visibility, analysis and rigorous processes help businesses avoid out-of-control costs, inadequate controls and (worse) bloated workforces.
This reflects what we’ve heard from HumanConcepts customers and what we’re doing as an organization to address their needs. Read it here.
Managing Layoffs Right
In Rehaul’s Managing Layoffs Right, Suzanne Johnson, our Director of Global Services, posits that “information and consistency” are keys to making RIF actions “as intelligent and compassionate as possible.” Read it here.
Workforce Analytics
Finally, working with the Human Capital Management Institute and CEO Jeff Higgins, we jointly published a new strategy brief Top 5 Metrics for Workforce Analytics. In order, they are: 1) Total Cost of Workforce, 2) Management Span of Control, 3) High-performer Turnover Rate, 4) Career Path Ratio, and 5) Talent Management Index.
We believe companies that adopt and understand these analytics are better prepared to manage the size and shape of their organization successfully during economic downturns and growth cycles. Get the brief here.
Kirsten Smith,
Katy Colletto,
Greg Ogarrio,
Lauren McNiff,
Suzanne Johnson,
Shay Berry,
Our combined organizations will boast more than 2,100 customers. Best of all, joining the Saba family will provide access to their extensive global resources, enabling us to deliver innovative enterprise services to market faster.
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