Unit4 Prosoft – A new experience 4U

2021 has been a big year for Unit4 and the Prosoft team, we have launched Prosoft v9 in July, this is the same system our customers have trusted for two decades with the same strong localisations across Asia-Pacific, launched in a new environment, with a new architecture and with a strong compliance and governance model.

Let begin by addressing what’s changing in the architecture, Prosoft v9 is first and foremost a SAAS only/cloud-only application, it’s contiguously deployed and it’s microservices-based, these are common buzz words in the market but what do they mean for our customers? They mean more rapid releases of statutory changes and other changes, and fundamentally it means a more stable system as changes to localisations or specific modules no longer require the deployment of the entire system, instead only the specific modules requiring changes are updated if need be these can be delivered in days not months.

Furthermore, the cloud services based architecture allows us to scale up resources to specific services based on usage levels across all customers, rather than a more traditional setup where a customer is setting up the system on a dedicated server and is entirely dependant on the throughput of that server. Lastly, the new hosting environment setup in Azure has some of the highest levels of data security compliance available in the market today, with SOC2 compliance adding to an already strong compliance suite of ISO27001 / ISO9001 which we had in Prosoft v8.5.

This means when you move to Prosoft v9, you are moving to an environment that is more reliable, faster, more secure and utilizes cutting edge cloud technologies to deliver the same great HR user experience users have valued for decades.  

So what else has changed? We want to share with you the key strategies.

Product Management

We have rapidly evolved our Product Management strategies in the last year, starting with an adoption of an ideation/customer ideas based strategy. In the last year our team delivered 49 out of 188 customer ideas (26% of customer ideas), this accounts for 50-60% of our innovation budget, so please come join us in our new Community4U portal that was launched at the beginning of 2021 and get voting because we are implementing what you the community vote for.

Additionally, we have more formally adopted the process of business-driven development, it’s a process where the R&D team collaborate directly with the customer prior to the creation of the product to ensure the products answer the questions our customers are asking. So if you’re early adopters of any new functionality don’t be surprised to see our product team directly on the scene collaborating with you to ensure a successful launch.

Next-Gen User Interface / User Experience

Next Generation UI/UX is a project which we have been working on for a few years, with the launch of Prosoft v9 that hard work is finally paying off. Our product vision is to provide the best people experience for APAC, to improve the efficiency of operational tasks to give you back time to do the more important things you have to do in life. We have always the strong local statutory compliance and powerful flexible enterprise operational HR tools, today we add employee/manager centric UI/UX to those strengths. Optimising for day to day tasks to be completed faster, making it easier for HR to distribute information across their organization ever before, with direct connectivity via mobile and dashboards.

Automation

45% of 594 HR and HR IT Leaders cited intelligent automation or process automation as their HR technology focus through 2022 on PWC’s HR Technology Survey in 2020. We have listened to our customers who have been asking about automation and made this one of our key focus areas. In an HR context, automation aims to improve the efficiency of HR processes, by getting rid of the tedious manual operational tasks so that the HR officers can focus more on doing tasks strategic tasks and tasks that add business value.

Payroll automation is one where we are making a large investment, a new feature rolling out in Q1 2021 implements automation in the end-to-end payroll approval process, changing a manual process into a process that is managed by exception.

Agility

Organisational Agility and business flexibility are essential to business survival in the modern work environment, especially during the uncertain times caused by the Covid pandemic. The 2021 EY Work Reimagined Employee Survey, which was conducted in March 2021 and received 16,264 responses from 16 countries across 23 industries, shown that nine in ten employees want flexibility in where and when they work. 54% of the employees even stated that they are likely to quit if they aren’t offered the flexibility they want.

The demand to be flexible tests HR in its agility and this includes the need for HR systems to adapt toward more flexible HR work systems. Flexibility is another key focus at Unit4. As an example, we have launched Time & Attendance in v9 with a flexible roster functionality. This feature allows employees and managers to take more ownership of their rosters rather than relying on centralized coordinators to manage rosters; for example, a manager could directly reach out to qualified individuals directly in the system to take a shift, if they have an absence in their team, completing a process in a few minutes which could take hours of calls around the organization.   

Prosoft – your single source of truth

Turning your HR system into a single source of truth is one of our key objectives at Unit4. Getting everything in one secured system instead of having confidential data across several systems, or even maybe in Excel files shared via emails, will improve efficiency, reduce errors, and improve organizational data security. At Unit4, we are introducing a new eForm module as a step toward Prosoft as a single source of HR processes.

With eForm functionality, a user can easily create a form to gather certain information from the employees, such as health declaration or vaccine status, instead of gathering this data using ad-hoc methods. Enhanced dashboard in Prosoft also provides better visualization from different data sources to support analytics work for managers and recruiters so they can have a better decision-making process as well as to be able to spot some non-conformances and to work directly to fix them.

As you can see it’s been a great 2021, with lots of great new products and we are ready to hit the ground running in 2022, be sure to stop by Community4U and register your ideas so we can focus our future roadmap where our customers see the most value. Please be sure to connect with your account manager if you want more information about any of the new features.