Choosing and implementing a new HR system: what’s involved?

00:00
Hello and welcome to today’s webinar hosted by Ciphr choosing and implementing a new HR system: what’s involved? And Cathryn, Ciphr’s, head of content. Joining me today are Laurie Mahmood, head of implementation services here at Ciphr, and account development manager, Katie Reis. Welcome Laurie, Katie, it’s great to have you with us today. Hi, thanks for having us, Cathryn. And Laurie, would you mind just introducing yourselves to everyone who may not have met you before?

00:29
Sure. Hi, everybody. My name is Laurie. I am the head of implementation services here at Cypher. I am responsible for the implementation of our HR recruitment and payroll software, been at Cypher for just over four years now. HR professional, by profession, sort of fell into this industry, implemented HR system myself, fell in love with how technology transformed the way that me and my team worked. Here at Cypher now heading up the implementation teams. Fantastic.

01:02
Thank you, Katie, you’ve joined us for a few webinars before, but some of our audience might not have met you. So could you give us a little bit about what you’re up to.

01:10
So hi, everyone, I’m Katie. I’m an account Development Manager at Cypher. And I’ve been here now, for almost six years. I’ve worked with hundreds of companies as they go through this journey and hope that can help you today with that prototype. And my background has always been within the HR and Payroll sector since leaving school. So various different jobs.

01:31
Okay, fantastic. So we’ve got a wealth of experience here among our experts for you today. And just going to kick off and share our agenda, we’re going to start by looking at how to make a selection of success. So Katie’s going to talk us through the nuts and bolts of that hugely involve, how to pull together your goals and your requirements list, and what’s involved with dealing with vendors. And then we’re going to hand over to Laurie who’s going to talk us through how we implement Cypress HR systems, the key stages and tasks involved in that project, what you might expect from a vendor in terms of support, and how to engage your end users with your new HR software. And then at the end, we’ll have a nice summary of all that, because we’ve got a lot to get through today. And there’s a question answer at the end. So if you have any questions throughout Katie or Lori, please just drop them into the Questions box and we’ll get to those. You haven’t come across Cypher before. We’re a specialist provider of HR, payroll, recruitment and learning software to our HCM platform Cypher connect, our solutions are used by more than 600 organisations across the UK in a wide variety of sectors. If you want to find out more about any of our products or solutions, you can visit our website@fiverr.com or email us at info@cypher.com. Okay, to kick off today, we’ve got a quick poll just to see what the experience level is among our audience. So have you selected and implemented HR software before? Yes, you’ve been involved in selection process before? Yes, you’ve been involved in implementation before? Yes, you have experience of both selection and implementation. Or no, this is all new to me. So just choose one of the options there. And we’ll get a gauge of where our audience is at today. So Katie, you mentioned in your nearly six years or so for you’ve dealt with hundreds of organisation, what’s the typical experience level of the people you talk to around selection and implementation.

03:20
But there is no typical i There were people who haven’t even used an HR system, let alone implemented ones before. I’ve got ones that are using legacy legacy systems. We’ve got like, whereas I can also have people who all they do is implement systems and and flitter from company to company. So it is absolutely varied. And hopefully I’ll kind of touch on each of those kinds of levels of people as we go through today.

03:44
Okay, lovely. Thanks for that. Thank you all for voting. Some really interesting results here. So two fifths of the 42%. So this is all new to you. So welcome. We hope you’ll have a lot more information. Once we get the end of this hour, a third of you have experienced adverse selection implementation, and about 10% have experienced one or the other aspects of the system project. That’s great. I’m going to hand over to Katie now who’s going to talk us through how to make selection and success.

04:13
Cool. Well, thank you so much, Catherine. As mentioned, I’ll be taking you through a few points that from my experience you need to consider as part of this journey. So it’d be the HR and people teams aren’t normally bias within a business. So this can be completely new to you guys. Even if you’ve implemented systems before, you may not have gone through your internal procurement steps and requirements. So it’s really important about understanding what that kind of looks like for your organisation. So the selection stages of any kind of SaaS solution, whether that’s HR Payroll, recruitment, learning, having that understanding is really crucial. So next slide. Yeah. Let’s start by taking a step back from the wider business and think about what you want, what are your goals and why Are you reviewing systems? If successful in getting your project approved, then this will be your baby and potentially your legacy at that organisation. So what do you see as a vision for success? What will happen if you don’t change HR software providers and carry on just as the way you are, we know we’ve got lots of people coming to market now he’ll have, his system is being discontinued, and that’s why they’re there, or it’s not meeting them or they’ve grown loads. It’s also think about what that means. So we all want a system that can give employees access to data and holiday booking. But what would that mean for your current processes and employee engagement and and the wider workflows of the business, for example, and easier, more intuitive systems means people are more likely to record accurate information, which means better reporting of workflows within the systems, which means more strategic decisions can be made, which means money can be saved for last time analysis and paying people when you shouldn’t. So it’s not thinking about the functionality you need. It’s about what will that mean for the business and you can keep going on layers of that. So which means that is a fun game to play. Now, I should state at this stage that we do work with all types of organisations? I don’t know. Kathryn, if there’s another click you need to do. Okay, yeah. So there we are. Lots of different types of organisations. So those were the HR teams can do the research, they can pick it and they can sign off the HR system. So it’s lovely, breezy, no one else needs to be involved. But we can also work in companies where everybody has to be involved. And I’d love to tell you that x employees and X sector, your processes X Y Zed. However, that isn’t the case. Every company regardless of size sector requirements is unique. So let’s start by thinking about the stakeholders you need to engage with at the pre sales stage. Who are they? Do they do have an internal projects, Team procurement managers? Does your FDA want to get involved at the long list or wait until you’ve shortlisted? Is their budget available? Do you need to ask it for due diligence at any stage? Will you do a business review of managers on what they want? And what do they want? So the FDA and CFO are most likely going to want to know about cost, but they may also want to know about contracts and commercial terms? How it can feed into things like their finance systems, it may need to discuss deployment, infrastructure security, do they have a formula to complete? What are their needs, likes and musts? And when When do they need this is key. So often we get to the stage where the HR team is ready, they’ve got sign on the door. They think they’ve done everything to start their implementation. But other parts of the organisation have worked on ETD. If you’re in contract, have you taken into account renewal dates, and contract closure terms of your current vendor? Does your board need to be involved? And if so, when does your board meet? Recently, I was working on a project and everything was ready to go we’d gone through all the commercials, everyone was happy, the board had to sign it. But the board only met every three months. And we didn’t we literally just missed that meeting. So we have to wait another three months for the board to meet again. And whilst you’re reaching out to vendors for demo, make sure you’re learning your internal steps at the same time. You’ll save yourself so much hounding from sales reps, if you can just give them the timelines up front and say this is what I’m working to. There’s no point ringing me every week. So you will get a copy of this. And here are some examples of stakeholders and what they might be interested in and who these people are in your organisation. So will they need to be involved in your procurement process. Doing this work upfront will just save you lots of headaches further down the line. Now thinking outside of requirements, so not the wants and the glitter and the jazz of software, but going to market, you need to understand the information that vendors will want to know if you can provide this. If you give them this information, it genuinely gives you more leverage. So first current cost in terms. When is your contract renewal. Most SaaS solutions have an auto renew minimum of one year, so many projects will get delayed. If it’s left too late, and the need to resign for another year with their existing provider. You need to think that depending on your size, and what you’re buying from that new system, and implementation can take anything from three to nine months. If you’re a large organisation, it can even take longer. So depending on what you want to do, this is really important to know about when you’re going to have that crossover period and when you need to hand your notice in to your current provider. But also given how much HR systems can do these days. What other system to use as a business that you spend money on and you can now merge into one that will give you an idea of what budgets you can have and knowing your timelines. With that with the budgets, more often than not, you actually don’t get to know this. So we’ll always like know if you have a budget in mind. And the response is finance have asked us to research first. So but just try know the limits, because there’s nothing worse than seeing your dream system and it being way over budget, but equally imagining settling for a lesser system, because you didn’t ask for as much money as you could. And if you’re clear with vendors on this, and lots of people don’t like saying their budgets even if they do No, because they’re worried that we’re going to come in under it or over it, or we’re going to aim for it. The benefit of us knowing or any vendor, knowing your budget is that if we are too expensive, we’ll tell you, and we’ll save you the heartbreak of seeing an awesome system that you can’t afford. Or they’ll say, let’s see what we can do to make this work. disclosing your true budget won’t make a vendor don’t raise their prices, especially in the current market. Internal procurement steps is a huge one. As HR and not regular buyers, this can be completely new to you. So often we work with companies who think it’s just a matter of selector sign off. But actually there might be stages of due diligence and board approval, and the FDA wants to get involved. So just try and understand the steps and include them in your project timeline, and prepare for when people are available or unavailable. So think school holidays, might be heard on getting some key decision makers together is the due diligence stage. So this is often key for it and other departments knowing financial securities and risks. So what’s the sign off that your business needs for that? Resource, internal resource? Now, depending on your project size, we would recommend two to three man days a week for that an early stage. The data important cleanse is a huge job, regardless of what system you go with. When is a good time in a business for you to allocate this time? Or do you need to plan for a longer implementation to align with your eternal resource? Think about staff availability in terms of time off, but also other major projects that may be undertaken simultaneously? Do timelines and deadlines? Do you? Do it have other projects that they must complete before yours? What are your current system contract dates? And can you renew for three or six months? Or is it just the 12 months? When does your board meet to sign up contracts? Do you have budget now? Or is it the next financial year? If you can notice now you can save a lot of time and disappointment beta. Okay, so you’ve spoken to everyone, you’ve got all the information and research complete. Now you need to get your head around what you have, what you want, what you need, and what you dream of. So what’s for now, what’s for phase two? What’s for phase three? Do you want to implement everything in one go. And so you go into full Big Bang, you’ve got the resource available, you’ve got the budget, you want to get it all done? Or are you gonna go from a phased approach so that you can kind of engage with people make sure you streamline and motivate people as you go along. And that’s a really big thing to think about is about whether or not you’re going to go all in at once, or you’re going to drip feed, and you’re just going to buy the core modules and grow it later. The requirements list to begin with should be just a tick box. So when you first engage with people who have a tick box, can the vendor meet our basic needs and wants not disappearing, though, remember, it is minimum requirements, for example, must be included in here. And here are some key thinking points for you. We know if you haven’t been to market for a long time, you don’t know what you don’t know. And you can speak to the vendor and say that and actually what you want them to do is just show you what’s available. So you can decide what what you like what you don’t like. And as vendors, we’re more than happy to do that with you. But just have a top level requirement, you know, is performance included is payroll included, that kind of stuff. And then

13:55
finally, most vendors you deal with will be able to help you and be keen to let you know if they’re the right fit or not. Yeah, we’re not in the interest of bringing on people that we can’t meet the needs of and I can’t imagine any other companies as well. So by being open about your timelines, your budgets, your requirements, even even who else you’re talking to, you can create an easier journey for yourself. One of the things I always think it’s good to consider here as well is the values and ways of working is a really great one. You represent your employee brand. So why would you work with a company that isn’t as aligned? Have you looked at their app as a business and what their employees say? And are they going to be able to provide best practice guidance, you know, are they we’re very fortunate Cypher, most of us are from an HR background. So we not only love that a system can solve problems, but we’ve actually had those problems ourselves so we can understand it from both sides. That’s the kind of thing you want to be thinking about when you’re talking to people do they understand your needs and why you need them? That’s an introduction. If anybody does want to have further questions only Not just last night, I think Katherine’s got some questions at the end as well.

15:05
Yes, definitely, there’ll be time for questions at the end, just send them in using the control panel on your screen. And Lori is now going to take us through implementing your new HR system. They are very brilliant. And we’re gonna start this new segment and just with a quick kick off poll, again, to understand which aspects of implementing HR software are causing the most concern. And you can check as many of those as apply to you and your current project, and protect perhaps finding the time or resource to dedicate the project, learning how to use a new HR system, cleansing and importing data, not getting enough support from the vendor, or possibly something else that please send in a message if it’s, if it’s something else that’s causing you sleepless night, to learn, in your experience, you’ve had lots of clients with their projects, what sorts of things do people generally worry about when faced with implementing a new system?

16:00
It can vary depending on the size of the organisation, and what sector they’re in. But um, I think probably one of the most common one that we come across is the client not really understanding or knowing what their responsibilities are. So you know, lots of clients that we work with have never implemented software before. So they’ve kind of never been down this rodeo should we say, and just have no idea of what to expect or what responsibilities that they will have their side. And hopefully going through this, this, this webinar today will be able to give you some really useful hints and tips of what to think about when implementing when implementing software. Okay,

16:39
thanks so much, I’m just gonna share the results. And I have some really interesting ones here. So three quarters of you are concerned about finding the time or resources to dedicate the project. And that’s always a perennial concern when you’ve got so many competing activities within within the need in your organisation. Two thirds of you are concerned about cleansing and importing data, like that’s a really big project to get through. And it sounds like a mini project as part of implementation, particularly if you’re moving from one system to the other. But also if you’ve got desperate records on like spreadsheets or Word document, then that’s a big task to gather all that data together. And then around another third of you are concerned about learning to use a new HR system or not getting enough support from the vendor. And that kind of support side is definitely something that we’re going to talk you through now. So I’m gonna hand over to Lori now.

17:29
Catherine. Thank you, Katie. Hi, everybody. I’m now going to talk through cyphers approach to implementing our solutions. So over the past 12 to 18 months, we’ve been working really hard to streamline and standardise how we implement our products to help all of our customers get the most out of their Cypher implementations. So this is just a high level overview of the stages that you would go through in a typical Cypher HR implementation. We’ve broken it down into nine stages, and these stages are displayed on the screen. So I’ll quickly do a high level run through of these nine stages. So firstly, we start at the Welcome stage. So this is where we welcome you to the project and implementation team. And we agree when we’ll start your project with a kickoff meeting. Secondly, at the kickoff stage, your kickoff meeting will be led by your Cypher project manager and will agree the scope of your project and understand your key requirements and agree our approach to delivering your project. So once we’ve passed that stage, we’ll move on to setting up your customer hub. The hub will provide you with access to everything you need for a successful project, including where you can access your project plan, project status reports, RAID logs and consultancy reports. It’s all kept in one place for you to access. Next, your consultant will then work with you to agree the specification of your Cypher system and the data that we will be importing into it. Once we’ve agreed the spec, we will begin the data import and configuration stage of your project. Once your data is in, you’ll help us to test that configuration and approve it. stage six is time for additional configuration. So this is for any additional modules that you’ve may have purchased above our standard Cypher suite. Once the scope of the project has been delivered and implemented, it’s now time for the approval stage of the project. And this is where your project manager will start planning your transition into business as usual. So at stage eight, we hand over to business as usual, and we will close the project with a project closure meeting. And final stage is with implementation complete your Cypher success account manager and our customer care team will then be on hand to continue to help you Get the most out of your Cypher system. So if we move on to the next stage, what I want to look at here is just go into a little bit more detail at those various stages of a typical HR implementation. So, phase one, which you can see on the screen that consists of the first five stages of our implementation process that we just looked at on the previous slide. So from the welcome stage all the way through to the import and implement your base configuration. So by the end of phase one, you’ll be able to use your new Cypher HR system to administer your people data, your HR team will be trained on how to use Cypher HR. And you’ll be live with your system for your HR users. And just to give you a bit of understanding of timeframe, but Bay’s there, or phase one, those first five stages of our process, typically, depending on you know, the resource that you have available, etc, but for most clients is around an eight to 10 week phase. So then if we move on to phase two, this is where we will support you with rolling out your employee and manager self service, as well as other things like your reporting and analytic functionality for HR users. Setting up sharing your HR Payroll data. So we can get that sent across to your your payroll provider or the software that you use, and configure and launch any other priority modules that you might have agreed at the kickoff stage at the end of this phase, your people in your organisation will be able to manage their data themselves on your Cypher HR system. And you can start and building custom reports and start reporting on your data. That’s stage two or phase two. And then we will move on to subsequent phases. And subsequent phases will roll out other modules and functions and functionality, which is in scope of your project, such as those that are shown on the screen. So other modules such as onboarding or talent management, and these, this, these phases will allow you to gain the benefits or the functionality in the priority order that you need them. So if we go to the next slide, so now I want to talk a little bit about the support that you will receive here one implementation. So I know that this all might seem a bit daunting if you’ve never done this before. But Cypher offers our customers plenty of support along the way. So firstly, you’ll be supported by our consultancy team. So we’re an experienced HR implementation team, who are all HR professionals with a wealth of HR knowledge across a range of different sectors. You’ll have a lead HR consultant who will work with you on phase one of your project. Plus, you will have support from our specialist consultants for specialist modules. So things like when we’re implementing talent management or if we’re doing payroll integration. We are specialist consultants that will work with you on that. You’ll benefit from regular support sessions with your consultants as well as having comprehensive reports from every session that we do, which will detail any actions any recommendations. We will also provide you with lots of supporting documentation at the appropriate stages of the project, along with checklists to help your to help ensure that you’re on track and fully supported throughout the various stages of your project. So another bit of support that you’ll get from Cypher is our project management. So you will be supported by our experienced project management team. They have managed projects of all shapes and sizes and complexities and in different sectors. And they bring a wealth of knowledge to your implementation. And you will have a dedicated project manager who will work collaboratively with you and internally here at Cypher to ensure that all of cyphers resources are scheduled and delivered to keep you on track of your project. You will have regular project catch up calls with them, where they will have send you regular status reports as well as fully managed project plans that you can access in your customer hub. This dedicated point of contact will provide you with a consistent relationship throughout your implementation journey. They will help you and they will manage any risks any actions and issues and decisions so read as well as any change requests and help you manage cost, budget and timelines. So continuing on the support that you will receive when working with Cypher and implementation. We’re delighted to be relaunching what we call Cypher Academy this year. So this is our learning platform just for Cypher customers. It now features a new learning journey that supports our customers for implementation, and provides a comprehensive introduction into cyphers HR product. The HR implementation journey has been designed to enable our learners to build the knowledge and skills that they require to confidently implement cyphers HR product, its content has been carefully created to ensure that our learners receive a structured and engaging experience, which we have utilised a variety of different learning content types. So we’ve got things such as interactive elearning modules, scenario based learning, complemented by system simulation, so where you actually go in and mimic Cypher and you testing bite size videos, there’s lots of videos on there demonstrating functionality. Lots and lots and lots of user guides for all of cyphers functionality on how things work and how you configure them. And then bite size classes. So things like there’s webinars or classes where you can jump home with one of our experienced trainer, and they can talk you through specific bits of functionality. So if we move on, yep, so this is how you’ll see on this slide here we have, this is what our implementation learning journey will look like. So we’ve designed three levels. And as you can see, they slot in to our implementation process. So the three levels, we’ve got level one, which is system foundations, which happens quite early on in the project, as you can see, just after the kind of kick off stage. And this is an introduction, which will help you understand the basics of Cypher, how you kind of log in how you navigate and move around the system and get you familiar with that. Then as we move on through the project, as we start to then spec, your system will then have level two. And during this level, you’ll become familiar with the configuration options required to successfully set up your system. And then a little bit later on, once we’ve imported your data into the system, you will then go on our level three system familiarisation level. And this is where it will teach your HR users how to use the system to basically complete their day to day activities such as setting up new starters, processing levers, updating employee records. So each of these stages, we’ve carefully designed to complement your implementation to ensure that you’re getting the correct training at the appropriate stage of your project. So we’re feeding in the training at the right stages, so it’s all relevant.

27:27
And yeah, to help make sure that you’re ready for each step of our implementation process. Next slide, please. Thank you. So that’s all the support that we will deliver as part of implementation and projects. So some of the key things, key tasks and considerations. So we offer our clients a huge amount of support. But there are a number of key things and tasks that our customers need to consider too. So let’s have a quick look at the tasks that you’ll need to complete. So attending consultancies, pretty much a given, we need to make sure that the correct people are attending them, you will need to approve specification documentation. So that’s one of the key stages of our implementation, approving the specs that we’re writing late and populate your data. So this is one of the biggies. This stage may take quite some time as well, you know, especially if your data is held in multiple places, or you’re not quite sure if it’s accurate. However, in my view, it’s one of the most important stages of the project. So always recommend that you take your time and give it the focus that it’s needed. meeting agreed deadlines. So as part of the project and part of the project plan, there’ll be lots of deadlines that we need to meet, you know, providing your data on this date at this time, etc. Completing the academy learning journeys that we just went through, complete any actions that come out of consultancies, again, which will all be documented on our reports and shared in your customer hub. And then working with us to user acceptance test, you know, will will provide lots of sort of scripts of things that you should be testing and recommendations of areas of functionality should be testing and making sure that you’re happy with how everything is working during implementation so we can support you on some of the tasks that now brings us some things to consider when implementing a new HR software is quite relevant to some of the poll. But do you have someone with dedicated time to collate and clay populate your data, you know, is one of the biggest stages of the project and you definitely need to consider making sure you’ve got the resource there. Do you have resource dedicated to configure and test the system? I think it’s vital to invest the time and energy at this stage. Do you have subject matter experts who can support you of implementing specialist module model that specialist module was sorry. Such as you know, talent management, you have an l&d team that you need to get involved at that stage of the project will be your super users, you know, who will we direct who will be working with who will you direct end users to who will be the super users in the system. You know, you’ll have your Cypher project manager, but you may want somebody entirely to act as a project manager, especially if you’ve got multiple different teams, your site involved in the implementation. And, you know, ultimately, I think, you know, an implementation process is not to be entered into lightly, you know, take it seriously implement your system carefully and thoroughly. And I strongly believe that you will have a system set up that you could then use for many, many years. So you’ve invested a lot of time and effort, from procurement through to selecting your chosen supplier, and then the implementation. And we want to engage with you employees. And here’s kind of a few hints and tips from me on how to engage your employees with the new system. Firstly, my biggest tip is, you know, making sure that we get managers and employees involved. And here’s a few ways that I think we could do that. So like, establish a communication plan. There’s nothing wrong in my eyes with over communicating, sell the benefits, what’s in it for them, for example, for employees, they will now be able to submit time off request by the system or they could do it from their mobile while sat on their, you know, watching TV at home, they have access to their employment documents, such as contracts or salary review letters, and you know, they can update personal information 24/7. For managers, it could be that they now have access to reports and no longer need to ask HR for this information. They have the ability to self serve and get this data instantly. You could also run a competition, encouraging employees to name the system, create a poll to the business, once you’ve narrowed it down. You could even possibly offer a prize to the winner communicate well ahead of launch. And involve employees in your testing and your pilot groups, you know, use different groups with different needs. So that you’re comfortable was part of that testing that you’ve set up and you’ve catered the system for everybody? Absolutely, you’re going to want to schedule and conduct user specific training for employees for managers. And personally, I’d consider a phased rollout. So I believe that this kind of helps with adoption, not to overwhelm your people with too much functionality at once. Especially if you know, you’re not used to using a system or you haven’t used the HR system before to communicate any actions that you’d like employees to complete in the system. For example, it’s quite common that when we come to implement it, clients are not quite sure if equality and diversity information is accurate or up to date, or if next of kin or emergency contact details are accurate. So these are all things that you can ask your employees to do when you roll out the system to get them engaged with using it. And my final tip would be to choose a quiet day to launch the system, which will then give managers and employees time to engage with it. Don’t launch it when it’s very busy, or you know the lots going on around the business. Pick a quiet today, it’s more likely that they’ll spend the time then having a look in the system and starting to use it. So yeah, thank you everybody. That’s it from me. I hope that that was useful, and good luck for those that are going to be heading on an implementation journey soon.

33:39
Thanks so much Nori, lots of really good useful tips and knowledge in there. I appreciate it. I’m just gonna run through some quick recap of what we’ve covered so far today before we dive into our questions and answers. So if you do have questions, please send them in using the control panel on your screen now and we’ll tackle those in just a moment. So starting with selection that Katie shared with us to find your stakeholders do you know what they want, why and when they want them? What needs to happen if you’re new to HR software to be considered success. These criteria will help you decide which solution is the right fit for you will help you deliver your goals. Get your house in order before assessing the market as far as possible. You need to know your budget, your procurement process, your timescales, and how much resource you will have available to commit to this project. And this project is two phases. Its production and implementation. So the resourcing requirements on each side might be slightly different. What are your essentials? And what are your luxuries? What functionality must you replicate in a new system? And what processes could you improve with a new system, but they aren’t business critical? One system is unlikely to do everything you need it to. So you have to hone in on your priorities in order to make the right decision. Be clear with vendors about your objectives budget and appetite for change. The more honest you are with vendors the better they can meet your needs and understand that their products and be the right fit. When it comes to implementation, every vendor will do it slightly differently. But today we’ve talked you through our new nine stage implementation plan, which guides and supports you every single step of the process. Phase one typically launches your central HR system to HR administrators and users. And then in phase two, we open up access to employees and managers. Cypher offers support throughout implementation through our consultancy team, project managers, and our digital learning platform Cypher Academy. When choosing a system vendor, ask them how they will support you through implementation and beyond business as usual, if they’re offering comprehensive vendor support is especially critical if you haven’t been part of an HR implementation project before. Remember, implementation sets you up for future success. You need to take implementation seriously and dedicate adequate internal resources to get your new HR system up and running. Get it right and it will enable your HR team and organisations who work smarter and achieve its goals. get it wrong, and not only will you struggle, but you won’t get the return on investment you desire. Okay, with that, I’d like to welcome Katie mo right. Oh, you were there willing to continue for a moment. And it’s time to tackle some of the questions that have come in. And so we’ve had a question from Kim Laurie, about the the documents that are made available in the cyber customer how can you tell us a little bit about what’s in there, what kind of format they are in she specifically asked if you’re using MS project,

36:27
but yeah, product managers use Microsoft Project. So your project plan will be on MX ms projects, and they will also export that in different formats for you if you want it PDF, Excel things like that. And then yeah, also in there is other documents such as lots of PDFs right from consultancy, reports, things like that. Responsibility documents, agendas, which are also attached to every single one of our consultancies, invites. We do it by Microsoft Teams. And you’ll get agendas for every single consultancy along with who we recommend should attend that consultancy any pre work that you need to do before that consultancy. But we store it all centrally so that you’ve got it all in one place as well, which is in the customer.

37:12
Yeah. Casey, a question for you. Like we talked primarily about working with clients in the UK but decipher work with companies outside the UK and a bit more globally?

37:22
Yeah, absolutely. So we’ll want customers who have a global reach, we are a SaaS based solution. So you can use us anywhere in the world. However, it’s probably worthy of note here that at this stage time for is kind of UK centric in our implementation. We’re all UK based. So we genuinely work with a UK based HR team. But we can work with customers who then have global reaches and rollouts as well.

37:45
Thank you. Another question we’ve had here at about GDPR, if any of you like to just talk a little bit about our readiness to support GDPR, both through the project through the product, and also through the company as a whole. I’m Katie, that might be a good one.

38:02
So absolutely. Data protection is what we live and breathe. And so within Cypher itself, we have all the accreditations you could think of so like cyber essentials plus accreditation, or ISO 27,001 accredited, there’s actually a data retention dashboard. So the system will be built around your data retention policy to know what needs to be deleted, anonymized renewed. And that’s a really important part of the journey and your training with us in building the system. So if your data policies built within the system, for to send you the triggers, it won’t delete your data without your approval. But as a company, we’ve got all that Yeah. In fact, probably the best peace of mind we can normally give is at the ICO or our customer. So you can imagine the hoops we had to jump through there to get that approval. And that’s rolled out to all our customers.

38:49
And the data centres we use. They’re based in the UK to that right.

38:54
Yeah, one in Manchester, one in Hemel Hempstead, sorry, over 190 miles apart feeding into each other.

39:00
Okay, thank you. I’m sorry, anything to add on the GDPR effect. And that kind of all covered?

39:05
Yeah, Katie covered it really well. But from a employee perspective, just a bit of functionality we have in Cypher as well. So if an employee asks for subjects, access requests, things like that, they can do that from the system. And the system will help you collate all of that, so that you can share it with your employees.

39:22
Awesome. Thank you, Katie, another question for you. Debbie asked if we worked with many schools, and I know we have great representation. That’s access. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that for me.

39:31
Yeah. Sounds nice. You’re on the school specialist. It sounds like it’s actually probably probably one of our biggest sectors. And that’s because of the things we can do to support single central registers and safeguarding checks. And we can manage multiple posts and this term time only things that we can support you with as well. So if you are a school, absolutely get in touch with us. And we’re very fortunate that the schools tend to be quite chatty and make lots of recommendations towards us.

39:58
If we’re talking about a school that Are there any considerations from an implementation perspective around like terms and holiday working?

40:06
Yeah, so most schools want to be implementing, well, the HR teams most available resource will tend to be July and August. So it’s just keeping that in mind. If that’s your goal date, that can be a really busy time for us, because everybody wants that time available is always great as well, if you’re actually planning on launching in September. So we can, as part of an inset day, provide some videos and content for you to launch it, you get the flexibility as well. So you might have like, the support working staff versus the academic staff might have different journeys that we can support there. From an implementation perspective, it’s very much about understanding your budget, your timelines in your resource, as of anybody, but yours is slightly skewed. In that I’ve seen you have your summer holidays, and your budgets can often be from September to August.

40:50
Okay, great. Thank you. Another question for you, Katie. And Jeff asked if there’s a minimum companies I work with

40:57
our customers start at 40 employees and go up to 31,000. However, it’s probably worth the amount that kind of under 125 employees, we wouldn’t go into that areas we’re not well, we can if you’ve got the budgets, but where there’s much more plug and play systems that tend to be a better suit for you guys, kind of 250 and above is where you get there. Yeah, the real good return of investment of a highly configurable system, unless you’re a business with really complex needs, and you absolutely need to be going for a configurable mid market system like sci fi.

41:28
And talking of compact needs a question for Mark, either Tobias. COVID has multiple complex work patterns. And some individuals have more than one role and set of managers is something that the cypher product can help with?

41:40
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got multiple posts, post post functionality within Cypher. So I can be an employee, I can be a cleaner indicator, I have one profile, but I have two managers who will only ever see data related to the job role, and they support me in there can be split out for your reporting purposes. And yeah, you can read as many different work patterns or terms and conditions in the system, and you just apply it to the people and the posts.

42:05
Maybe, thanks so much. I think that kind of covers all of our questions. And Katie, if though, if our audience would take one point away from today, when it comes to selecting a new HR system, what would you what is

42:18
that for you? This can be exciting. So whilst we probably scared you a lot today, we’ve resource and know this and know that this is exciting, you are going to be launching a system that’s going to be built around what you want and your journey. So so just remember the end goal through the administration work because a new system can be so much fun. And if you do want to set up a session with us to have a look at it will actually kind of show you what that can look and feel like as well. Where you can

42:51
and very same question for you. But on the implementation side.

42:57
One of the big keys is scaring everybody. It’s probably just the considerations that I spoke about, you know, the things to consider. As you head on to this journey, make sure you’ve got the right resource and, and just taking the time, you know, don’t rush it. You know, I hate it when customers really want to rush it through. And I feel that sometimes they’ve not fully utilised it or got most out of the system. So take your time, and put the resource in and absolutely be very, very successful.

43:27
Awesome. Thanks so much. And that brings us to the end of our session today. If you are watching live, this recording will be emailed to you. And so you can go back and review it anytime you like or to share it with some of your colleagues. If you’d like to learn more about cyber solutions, you can opt in using the exit form that you’ll see on the screen after the broadcast. That form also invites you to share a bit of feedback about today’s webinar, which we always really appreciate you coming in for us. Our next webinar. Should you be interested in on a the tax year and legislative update in regards to payroll through our payroll sales bashes. We’ll be taking you through everything you need to know for the new tax year. That’s on Thursday, the ninth of March at 11am. You can register at bit.ly/cyber payroll 23. So all it remains to be today. Thank you so much Katie nori for joining me today and sharing expertise. Really appreciate it. I hope everyone today has really found it useful. And we hope to see you on another webinar again soon. Thanks so much. Have a great day.

44:26
Thanks Lori.