Strategic investments in core HR drive operational excellence

Our vision for Dynamics 365 Talent is to balance operational excellence, organizational agility, and the employee experience to create a workplace where people and the business thrive.

To help our customers achieve this mission, we’re investing heavily in our core HR capabilities. Today we’re excited to announce that we have procured the rights to strategic solutions from FourVision and Elevate HR to accelerate HR operations innovation within leave and absence, time and attendance, and benefits.

Strengthening workforce practices for a connected workplace

Within today’s business climate of constant disruption, HR organizations must be agile to develop a workplace and workforce that can support the organizational mission. Core HR capabilities within Dynamics 365 Talent help organizations meet these objectives by centralizing workforce data and driving operational excellence across HR programs.

As people resources are the most expensive part of operating expenses, the imperatives of efficiency and cost reduction have always been a part of the HR mandate. However, when workforce practices are disconnected and lack a cohesive strategy across the company, the result is high turnover rates, longer hiring cycles, and lower employee engagement. This can impact the organization through a lack of product innovation, expensive operational errors, less satisfied customers, and ultimately, suboptimal financial results.

Continued innovation through strategic investments

The IP acquisitions announced today will support our customers throughout their transformation journey, breaking down people data silos and providing a centralized view of the workforce, as well as automating key tasks that may have historically been done on paper or using Microsoft Excel.

We’ve acquired licensing rights to FourVision’s HR solutions covering leave and absence, sickness management, and timesheet, as well as Elevate HR’s benefits management capabilities that will be incorporated natively within Dynamics 365. These new capabilities will greatly enhance our ability to help HR teams drive operational excellence across these critical employee experiences:

Leave and absence

Managing leave and absence plans is critical for employers to ensure business coverage and provide time away benefits to their employees. Leave and absence plans vary greatly in the rules that govern eligibility, accruals, limits, usage, and carry over. This is further complicated by complex laws that many countries enforce on these types of entitlement programs. Our investment in this area will enable an enhanced set of capabilities for leave and absence plans, including programs such as family and sick leave to help HR better manage the numerous complex laws and bargaining agreements enforced on these types of entitlement programs.

 Time and attendance

Tracking the actual attendance and time away of employees via timesheets is critical for many operational processes such as payroll, benefit, and pay eligibility.  Our investment in this area will enable organizations to support the complex policies that vary greatly by country, industry, and organization for tracking time worked. Manufacturing, retail, and professional services organizations now have the ability for simple, quick, and accurate time entry integrated with leave and absence.

 Benefits management

Organizations need to develop and manage highly competitive benefits programs to competitively attract and retain employees. Managing these programs requires highly configurable systems that also bring intuitive and modern self-service capabilities for employees to understand and manage the benefits available to them. This key investment will help our customers manage complex benefit programs, including tiered benefit rates, and eligibility. The new capabilities will have a configurable self-service enrollment process that is flexible to allow for benefit groups, hierarchies, flexible credits, and auto-enrollment. We will also be providing benefit managers with the ability to integrate employee and enrollment information with their benefit providers.

These new strategic investments will enable HR to operate with the dexterity and speed required by the rest of the enterprise and enable employees to self-serve their critical HR tasks. Optimizing HR operations also frees up teams to better advise, consult, and innovate with their C-suite stakeholders. We will be providing updates on when these new capabilities will be delivered in the product via our release plans and roadmap.

 Core HR and Dynamics 365 Talent

As part of the Dynamics 365 portfolio, core HR helps power your people process through the Common Data Service and integrations with other Dynamics 365 applications such as Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Over the last year and a half, customers across retail, nonprofit, manufacturing, and professional services industries have been selecting the core HR capabilities within our Dynamics 365 Talent application to accelerate their digital transformation of human resources and our usage continues to double every six months. With these additional strategic investments, our customers will be able to tackle workforce transformation even faster.

“We have four main pillars in our company—people, clients, operations, and finance —and people always come first. Deploying Talent was a strategic decision that fits within our long-term roadmap of accelerated global expansion, and it’s already starting to pay off.  We’ve seen Microsoft devote considerable resources to expand and enhance the product to make it a diverse human resources solution. These new investments are a great example of that effort and help position our team for future growth in the Multi-Site construction industry.”  – Chris Galazka, Vice President of Human Resources, Sevan Multi-Site Solutions

Learn more

You can find more information on the complete set of core HR functionality that currently resides in Dynamics 365 Talent on our website.