Enhanced Human Capital Management Functions in SpiceCRM

A CRM System is a central system used by people. And people are what sales is all about. Of course, any system can support & any system can help. AI might do the thing – but let’s face it, ultimately, sales & service are still a people business.

With that in mind, in the general capabilities of our CRM, we have added and are adding features for Human Capital Management within SpiceCRM.

Organizational Management

This allows for the structuring of companies and depicts organizations in a proper org chart. It allows for the adding of descriptions to the org units and assigning people to them.

On one hand this is great for planning processes but on the other it becomes essential for workflows as well as for a smooth integration in the SpiceCRM’s Access Rights management system.

For example, it is possible, in a Workflow, to easily define which approval needs to be completed by the lead of the financials team & SpiceCRM will, through the predefined organization, automatically go and find the right person to route the workflow task to.

In the case of access rights, it will simply assign a new sales person to an org unit and automatically grant all the proper access rights required by the system.

Skills and Training Management

At the Employee level we allow for the easy maintenance of a skill a person has acquired & pick that/those skills from a central catalog. Certificates can also be added (ie.if this is linked to a certification authority) as well as the validity dates of the given certifications. The achievement here is the proper & organized planning of the required training & the assurance of possessing the necessary skills (ie. those that are legally required to be up to date within the organization).

In this way, easy visibility and access to the skills one has and who might be the adequate resource to do a specific job, is highly evident.

Equally important is the option of the training plan. For example, in one of the annual reviews one might agree on a specific training path and then start planning it accordingly.
Additionally, employees may request specific & additional training courses. The integrated workflow allows for the approval of tasks and then once completed the training , if these are also linked to a set of skills that were attained by the specific training, they are automatically added. The completed training course is therefore also documented on the employees’ record.

In some industries ie. Healthcare where the proof of completed training is essential and legally required, this is also a great tool to document the upskilling & progress at an organization/company level.

Recruiting

In addition to the organizational and skills management also Job Openings can be defined in the CRM so that the full recruiting process & experience is supported directly in SpiceCRM. This allows for the capturing of personal data of all applicants & for predefined flows for the application itself inclusive of prescreening, interviews and a final decision.

Questionnaires can be used to support a structured evaluation process of an applicant, where a team interviewing candidates for an opening is required.

An automated workflow can manage & support the recruitment process and include automated emails & notifications both internally as well as directly to the applicant ie. in case of the rejection of a candidate.

Personal Measures

With regards to employee records all kinds of personal measures can be recorded bringing the CRM up to the level of a Digital HR Management tool. Even in this case, the measuring is tied to a predefined catalog that might begin with employment, rewards, disciplinary warnings or more, depending on the situation.

Measures can additionally be tied to a predefined questionnaire to capture supplementary structured information. These measures can also be printed and mailed using SpiceCRM’s internal PDFs and templating engine.

Leave Requests

An additional Feature is that employees can record & request a leave of absence. This provides a central source of information in companies regarding who is currently available or not. Leave requests can, of course, be of different types i.e. vacation, home office, sick leave or other.

The above is all linked to the workflows in the CRM and, therefore, also run through a predefined approval process.

Last but not least, the leave requests are also queried in the Access and Workflow Management so that an employee can allocate a substitute/backup within the organization. During the leave the substitute will receive all of the notifications and will also inherit the system rights so he/she can do the job as a backup to the person that is currently not available.

Travel Requests and Expense Recording

Sales and service staff are also supported when meeting customers. Planning of trips and the settling of travel expenses is also essential. SpiceCRM is organized in a way that there is a flow that starts from the creation of the travel request up to the approval of the manager & also up until the collection of invoices and expenses/ Finally, the generation of a travel expense report will also be created. The last step is finally the approval of the submitted expenses for reimbursement.

In project based organizations, costs can also be settled/directed towards a project and collected from there as well as invoiced to the customer using the Invoice tools provided within SpiceCRM.

Time Record / Time Sheet

Last but not least SpiceCRM, of course, also allows the planning of tasks in project based organizations and the collection of the hours spent on various projects and tasks so as to get a time recording in place & capturing the productivity of employees. 

And where applicable the recorded times can also be used to charge them further on to customers.