Small Business HRIS - a New Partnership

Last week Zoho, a provider of a wide range of online productivity applications, (documents, wikis, CRM, projects, and many more) announced a new partnership with Vana Consulting, a Canadian consulting firm.

The new solution branded as VanaHRM, is an on-demand HRIS built on the Zoho People platform and aimed at the small to medium sized market.

One of the issues that I had seen during some limited testing of Zoho People was that it definitely required some technical skills to configure for an organization's unique needs.  In my opinion most small HR staffs would not have been all that comfortable or capable to really 'dig in' and leverage Zoho People's flexibility to develop and configure a solution that would support organizational specific business requirements.

This is why the partnership between Zoho, the developer of the platform, and Vana, a Human Resources consultancy makes sense.  Vana seems to have simplified and organized the Zoho People solution  and packaged it in a form that is more understandable and accessible to the market.

The VanaHRM solution supports the full range of Human Resources processes (employee tracking, talent profiles, performance management, recruiting, benefits tracking, self-service and more).

A sample screen from VanaHRM is below:

Pricing for the VanaHRM solution starts at $19/month for up to 10 employees and then increases with the number of employees; an organization of 100 employees is prices at $199/month for example.  Curiously, the prices listed at the Vana site are the same that are published on the Zoho People site.

For small business in need of an automated HRIS solution, particularly those under 100 employees, VanaHRM is definitely worth a look.  It is a solution with the capability to handle almost all HR-related processes (save Payroll), is highly configurable, and reasonably simple to use.

I would love to hear from anyone out there using VanaHRM or Zoho People in their organizations and have them share some of their experiences.

Comments

[Ann Bares]

Interesting, Steve. I serve a lot of clients in this size range, and they need a solid, easy-to-use, cost-efficient solution. Hopefully this means a good one is on the way. Thanks for sharing the info.

[Steve]

Thanks Ann, I wrote one or two other posts a few months ago on other HRIS options for the small (and very small) business, and in my research did find a number of compelling alternatives. In fact, the large number and diversity of capability of the various options can be a bit daunting for the HR departments of these small firms (many times just one person) to get a good handle on the market. Thanks very much for reading and for your comments.

[David Vanheukelom]

Steve,

Thank-you for the summary on VanaHRM, you captured it perfectly. In addition to extending the solution as delivered in areas including performance management, benefits, health & safety, and salary planning; we worked with Zoho on integrating Zoho Reports and delivering pre-packaged reports with our solution.

With respect to pricing, our value proposition along with Zoho is to deliver a feature rich and configurable solution, on-demand, and at an affordable price point. We saw no reason to change Zoho's pricing model.

Thanks

David Vanheukelom
President and CEO
Vana Consulting Group Inc.
http://www.vanaconsulting.com

[Steve]

David - Thanks for your comments, in fact I should have probably noted that since the VanaHRM pricing was indeed the same as via Zoho directly, that a small business should certainly engage Vana to leverage the pre-built VanaHRM solution and the Vana expertise. I think the model makes quite a bit of sense for the small business and the small HR group and I would expect you will have lots of success with this partnership.