HR outsourcing allows managers to focus back on business

By KIMBERLY BONViSSUTO
clbfreelancer@crain.com

Robert Oberst worked for the big guns. He was in charge of administrative systems, handling outsourcing ser­vices for Fortune 500 companies.

And he marveled at the ineffi­ciency with which these power companies operated in terms of their human resources administra­tion. It wasn’t uncommon for one organization to use upwards of 20 different vendors to handle differ­ent pieces and parts of its human resource operations.

Dataquest, a division of Gartner Inc., a Stamford, Conn.-based provider of research and analysis reports that the market for human resource outsourcing is growing by 22% annually. CFO magazine fur­ther reports that administration outsourcing carries financial benefits as well, saving companies up to 80% of their costs in this area.

Mr. Oberst said among the reasons small or medium-size organizations outsource their human resources administration include recent growth, a desire to concentrate on the business, the ability to offer more services to employees or outdated human resources information systems.

With more companies outsourcing their human resource services, Mr. Oberst saw an opportunity to re-engineer personnel management practices for small to medium-size businesses. In May he opened The HR Service Bureau in Solon, a web-based enterprise providing comprehensive human resource administration to businesses with 50 to 500 employees.

Mr. Oberst utilizes new human resources service practices, which he helped develop, including apply­ing technologies such as voice response and the web to employee administration.

“Instead of doing a lot of cus­tomized work, you deliver over the web and make it simple,” he said. “You can have one stream of data and take care of it all.

The HR Service Bureau assumes all the hardware, software, operations and administrative duties associated with a human resources system on behalf of its clients, radi­cally simplifying processing, and saving the company a huge amount of time and expense, reducing legal exposure, insuring compliance, motivating employees and improving performance.

Mr. Oberst said the complexities of human resource administration, compounded by myriad pieces of legislation during the past 25 years, have led many businesses to fragment their human resource services. Coordinating their efforts and supplying every vendor with accurate data on a regular basis became complicated and inefficient.

“We’re similar to a payroll service bureau, but we take care of the complex human resource processes, which in turn allow managers to concentrate on their businesses without being bogged down by these human resource matters,” he said.