Does Microsoft's Latest Human Capital Management Positioning for Dynamics ERP Indicate a Real Change in Strategy?

Managing human resources used to be a pretty simple process:  companies either used an automated or manual system to provision employees as they came onboard, track them, and ensure that they received their paychecks and benefits. Today, that process has evolved to the point where it has its own title and acronym. Using human capital management (HCM), today's firms view employees as capital assets and treat them as such, often using technology to handle some or all of the management itself.

"Human resources is more complicated and strategic than ever," says Joshua Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting in Berkeley, Calif. Companies need to spin up work teams to handle specific jobs, for example, or make sure they have enough workers to deploy that big Christmas order for Walmart. "Achieving those goals requires the right balance of people and processes; all the raw materials in the world won't do any good."

Addressing Key Challenges

As with many business processes that have evolved from manual to automation, technology will be the ultimate differentiator when it comes to HCM. Microsoft recently published several new blog posts on the topic to its promotional column on Forbes.com that lay out the Dynamics ERP vision for HCM.

In The New HR Manager: Moving From Administrative To Strategic, Microsoft program manager Dan Schuster pinpointed some of the key challenges facing today's HR departments, including the need for self service functions for  personal information, benefits, course registration, and performance management.

Schuster also believes that tools like Microsoft Dynamics AX allow companies to formalize position maintenance with ...