Case study: How AmBank took its HRMS to the next level

Azaharin Abd Latiff, senior vice-president of group HR operations and projects at AmBank Group sheds light on the firm's journey to take their current system, to the next level – the HR cloud level.

The introduction of HRMS in the HR world is a game changer for the HR industry and its professionals, however constant upgrading is crucial to stay relevant for the future.

Despite having a HRMS that serves well for the automation of processes in HR functions such as payroll, claims, leave administration and benefits administration, AmBank Group is looking to upgrade and expand its current system offerings online to take the organisation to the next level.

On the current system, Azaharin Abd Latiff, senior vice-president of group HR operations and projects at AmBank Group says: “despite having served its purpose to consolidate data with the ability to generate reports for analytics research and studies, the limited deployment of HR processes and transactions for employees and people managers is hindering the future progress of HR.”

He explains that when implementing the previous system, they took the business needs at that time into consideration where the focus was to automate the more transactional people manager functions.

However, as AmBank analysed the needs of today and in anticipation of future, they realised that the current system they have adopted may not allow for deployment to the prescribed users.

Due to the need for further analytics for better decision making, AmBank has decided to embark on an upgrade of their current system, to a more versatile, mobile and accessible HRMS, to take them to the next level – the HR cloud level.

This campaign, owned by HR Operations and Projects for Group HR, will take the approach of visualising the end-result AmBank wishes to achieve and conceptualise the approach to materialise it.

“It takes the standard project management approach where we diagnose and define the situation, measure the extent of improvement required, analyse the best approach, initiate the improvement and control the execution for sustainability,” Azaharin explains.

“Parties involved are invited to participate from the idea inception stage. This is strategically done as to promote team synergy and co-ownership of the campaign.”

“In today’s HR technology, it is about sustaining the HR relevance in an organisation and positioning HR as a strategic partner in making business decisions,” Azaharin says.

One of the ways in which HR can be a strategic partner is in terms of talent acquisition and generating employment branding via social media.

“Easy access to the organisation value propositions and creating followings via online content marketing is now the way forward, alongside the gamification of HR sciences.

“A platform that allows for effective management of these advancements is more crucial than ever now, especially in keeping to the latest in technology whilst manoeuvring around the noise.”

Azaharin expects timeline, resources capacity at execution stage and post adoption to be the primary challenges expected during the implementation of the campaign.

The key to mitigate these challenges – consistent and regular communications.

“Communicate for the audience or users to understand the need and what are the changes, when and how it will affect them positively and what do they gain in return.”

Azaharin notes that the small results achieved so far are just milestone achievements of the larger end-result AmBank expects.

“We are on a journey and we need to keep the pace going. Currently, the team morale is high and positive.”

“Team members are motivated to be a part of the changes, and this is evident across the team. Productivity has increased significantly alongside high team engagement level.”

He adds that talent acquisitions processes utilising HR technological advancements such as HR cloud is expected to deliver a minimum return of 25% cost savings in comparison to the traditional talent acquisitions platform.

“These cost savings are derived from monetising the talent acquisitions cost such as less dependence of third party cost for candidates sourcing, higher productivity in hiring, longer retention of new hires and availability and continuous resources supply.”

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