If there is one home truth that decision makers in commerce have come to learn during the spate of recent worldwide economic turmoil, it is the fact that people are truly the most important asset in business. This fundamental lies at the heart of operations at Swicon360, an established business technology partner and solution provider within the international Human Capital Management (HCM), HR and payroll markets.

The company continues to apply its growth management strategy with success and management is focused on expanding its reach into the domestic market. This solid positioning and firm footing has been strengthened by Swicon360’s HCM Spectrum in the Cloud offering, an influential launch of business process outsourcing (BPO) services in support of the SAP® ERP Human Capital Management application.

Swicon360’s HCM Spectrum in the Cloud offering, in association with industry leaders SAP AG and Vodacom Business, was unveiled during the first quarter of 2010.

This offering allows the company to deliver to customers a cost-driven business case in support of SAP ERP HCM, backed up by its status as a “Powered by SAP” certified provider of BPO services. Customers can realize benefits of implementation as early as three months, as a result of Swicon360’s certified template approach.

As a service, the launch not only signalled the quality and quantity of the company’s expertise, technical knowledge and experience in integration, application and full support, it also emphasised the company’s differential quality as the only SAP-certified provider of BPO services headquartered in Africa.

At the time the introduction of this solution heralded a new phase of offerings to local and international business communities.

However, company leaders took a decisive step forward and advanced Swicon360’s standing in the market with the introduction of ‘Pay as you Use’, an alternative approach to HR management that is fundamentally based on the same principle as ‘pay-as-you-go’.

Developers of the solution say that investors will benefit from the fact that SARS changes and updates are automatically updated on the system, all SAP upgrades, enhancements, legal compliances are also updated, Swicon360, through its embedded local expertise, will also ensure clients are compliant and they have access to reliable support.

Additional advantages include focus on workforce management, retention, and strategic use of resources, performance management and reporting toolkit.

“The solution we are presenting to the market represents a significant step forward in the development of human resource management and the maturity of the local human capital management market. It really means that the investor only pays on a ‘per-employee-per-month’ basis. We believe that it accurately reflects the dynamics and considerations that now characterise modern human capital management,” says Markus Bucher, CEO at Swicon360.

Bucher and his fellow managers say that human capital management, and its BPO offering in particular, is substantially different from traditional human resource management.

To reflect this difference, Swicon360 points to one of its recent cost-comparison case studies. Based on a business with one thousand employees, with an assumption of ten payroll users, two super users, eight hundred employee self service users and two hundred MMS users, Bucher suggests that the statistics speak volumes in terms of the return on investment between Swicon360 HCM technology (HCM Spectrum) and the afore-mentioned traditional scenario:

• 1000 x SAP employee licenses
• 10 x SAP Pro user licenses
• 2 x SAP limited Pro users
• 800 x ESS licences
• 200 x MSS licenses
• Maintenance
• Implementation
• Hardware
• No support, no upgrades, no patches, no reporting.

The components of a traditional SAP HCM implementation listed above could have a total cost of ownership for the customer of approximately R9 000 000.00 over the first 5 years of ownership.

These statistics are mirrored against the return on investment projected for a company or business that takes HCM Spectrum on board.

HCM Spectrum is priced at R63 000 per month which equates to R63.00 per employee per month for this particular business case.

The HCM Spectrum solution will save the customer over fifty percent of the costs of a traditional SAP HCM Implementation over a five year period with no capital expenditure on licenses, hardware or implementation and includes all system patching and upgrades.

However many advantages a solution or technology encompasses, the fact remains that effective delivery of service and value-add to any organisation is based on the credibility, resources and ‘firepower’ of a services partner claims Bucher.

To this end Swicon360 management is confident that the company’s proven track record and many industry-focused accolades reinforce its credibility.

Among the impressive list of achievements is official recognition from Novell (Business-to-Business Identity Solution Award presented for the company’s leadership in providing secure, identity driven SAP application outsourcing services), as well as a European Identity Conference Award (in the category ‘Best I AM Project in Cloud Computing presented to BasisOne, a South African-based hosting provider and Swicon360 group company with a strong focus on SAP solutions, for an infrastructure project involving I AM technology provided by Novell.)

Aside from building on the company’s credibility, management at Swicon360 remain focused on positioning the business at the forefront of human capital management, defined by the increased convergence of next-generation technology, services and support to assist decision makers in applying human resources strategically and to the benefit of all levels of operation.

It is not surprising that human resources development, incorporating people skills development, training and recruitment, has been quickly assimilated into the virtual services arena.

Part of the reason is because businesses, across all industries and sectors, have to adhere to a radically different HR market space. Practical issues such as work/life balance, mobility, access to data, new systems are juxtaposed with legislation pertaining to corporate governance – including data archiving, storage, retrieval and manipulation.

In addition, other factors such as the global credit crunch, significantly lower levels of economically active citizens, skills shortage, the need to improve operations and sustain levels of service all influence the overall picture.

This means that decision makers can no longer rely on traditional, outdated systems to comply with regulation and compete effectively in the modern corporate environment.

As such, HR is entirely integrated with virtual infrastructure in the cloud. It is now possible to invest in a collection of services, centralised, all-encompassing offerings that are consistently available and promote access to the very best in international HCM practices.

“As long as human resource development impacts on business growth and the use of technology continues to differentiate players within the human capital management space, we believe, with full conviction, that we have a market and that we will always add value,” Bucher concludes.