Zellis has announced the second release of its core HCM product, formerly ResourceLink. Details of what the latest release includes are limited, with Enterprise Times unable to access further information from Zellis. The announcement comes five months after the company released Zellis HCM 6.0, which improved data integration and reporting capabilities.
HCM Cloud 7.0 includes functionality improvements and new integrations and has also enhanced security. The last will be good news for customers, who will have been concerned by the MOVEit data breach that Zellis was one of the software vendors impacted by in June.
The new release was announced at the recent Zellis user summit on November 20th. More than 400 customers attended the annual conference. David Woodward CPTO, Zellis gave a whistle-stop tour of the new release during a keynote presentation. Further information was available in the breakouts.
George Dunnett, Chief Product Officer at Zellis, said, “Since the launch of Zellis HCM Cloud, we’ve seen customers moving quickly to adopt new features such as Power BI-based dashboards, API-based integrations to other HR systems, and an intuitive self-service mobile app. Since its launch in spring 2021, more than half of our entire customer base has migrated to Zellis HCM Cloud.”
What is in the Zellis HCM 7.0
Woodward highlighted some of the new and updated features, more information was available in the recent press release. These included:
Enhancements to National Minimum Wage (NMW) calculations
Woodward declared on stage, “One of the really unique capabilities of our platform is in the area of being able to calculate national minimum wage. Very, very few systems are able to do this. In fact, I am not aware of any other system that has the degree of sophistication and automation that we have built into our platform, but we have raised the bar even higher with this release.”
The improvements that Woodward alludes to include:
- The ability to split between the current period and annual NMW calculations to enhance monitoring capabilities and prevent overtime from being reported as excess hours.
- Improved automation around NMW calculations relating to absence and HMRC compliance.
These improvements will help organisations enhance their compliance with the NMW and National Living Wage (NLW) and should reduce the amount of time verifying and confirming compliance.
Integrations
The integration capabilities build on the enhancements of the previous release. The release improves the integration to Cornerstone TalentLink and introduces an integration to SAP SuccessFactors. The connectors ensure that changes to payroll information made in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central are replicated seamlessly into HCM Cloud Payroll, reducing the amount of manual intervention required. In turn, this improves accuracy and reduces the risk of under or overpayment errors.
Other enhancements
Woodward announced several other enhancements with this release, including:
- Enhancements to My view, an autocompleting for onboarding that makes the process more fluid
- Updates to accessibility to improve the user experience
- Update to usability, including bank account input
- Version 2.0 dashboards for HRD and DE&I
Platform enhancements
The release also sees the availability of the Zellis Intelligence Platform Developer Portal. This delivers guidance and documentation for developers to build their integrations to Zellis HCM Cloud. One of the key security elements around this is a new whitelisting capability for API calls. It means that only API calls that are expected will be able to interact with Zellis. This means that as vendors update or add to their APIs, changes may need to be made by Zellis to ensure they are authorised, reducing the risk of a security breach.
Zellis continues to enhance the platform, updating to the latest version of Java. It also upgraded its application platform to improve performance.
What’s coming
Zellis also showcased what it intends to release in 2024. These included the use of generative AI to power both payroll and HR Self-service features. There will also be the ability for customers to generate their automations using the Power Automate function. This will enable HR teams to automate their specific processes, further improving efficiency.
Dunnett added, “Technology architectural choices can often prove decisive in accelerating the pace of innovation. Our choice to adopt open data architecture and to work with Microsoft on Azure has been hugely validated by our rapid progress over the past year. Zellis is now working with customers to pilot new products using innovative technologies, with a view to releasing upgraded versions of our software next year.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
When piecing this together, Zellis HCM 7.0 looks like an impressive update with platform, functional and usability improvements across many areas. The platform improvements to integration are built upon, and Zellis has reacted well to the data breach it experienced by tightening its security further. It remains to be seen whether this update causes pain down the road as third-party vendor integrations break after updates. It is unclear exactly how the whitelist works.
Where perhaps there might be disappointment is that users will have to wait a little longer for generative AI. Many firms have launched generative AI capabilities in 2023. It will be interesting to see what Zellis rolls out in 2024.
