HRB/personnel management and payroll

System history

Historically development and HRB the consulting company Robertson&Blums promoted. It was founded in the 90th by two individuals – the Rigan Ivars Blums and the U.S. citizen Scott Robertson. The main direction of business of the company selected consulting in the field of IT and promotion of automation systems of business processes. In the main Robertson & Blums was engaged in the third-party western systems, including SunSystems, JD Edwards, Cognos. An exception was HRB which appeared as the personnel module to the SunSystems financial system in due time (the module initially was called RB Payroll, the first version appeared in 1995), and then developed into a separate product (starting with version 3.0 which appeared in 1998). The headquarters of Robertson & Blums was in Riga, and Eastern Europe where in the 2000th more than 50% of sales were the share of Russia was the main region of sale (though projects and in other countries, including such exotic, as Fiji and New Caledonia were kept).

At the end of 2006 the bargain about acquisition of business of Robertson & Blums of the American Amazing Global Technologies Ltd which at that time set the task of consolidation of players with examination of JD Edwards in the main world markets was concluded. In a year of Robertson & Blums it was renamed into Amazing and plans for a business udoveniye in 2008 were announced. However at the beginning of this year the management of Amazing decided to suspend activity in Eastern Europe, including territories of action of the former Robertson & Blums. Respectively, if practicians on products of third-party suppliers could be transferred to other integrators, then the situation with HRB as product of own development was not so unambiguous. Actually after leaving of Amazing from the market of Eastern Europe a personnel system nobody was engaged though it had rather large number of implementations – more than 550 clients in 22 countries of the world, including such companies as Philip Morris (which became the first key customer) used a system, Kodak, Sony, AIG, Citi Group, Unilever, Sony, DHL, etc. – all HRB serviced about 250 thousand workers at the clients.

Now the rights to a system managed to be acquired R&K. In total the group invested about $1 million in this process, and it managed to receive not only intellectual property, but also development team in the form of the Latvian AGroup and also the existing clients and a partner network.

The AGroup company which 51% of stocks belong R&K now, in turn, was founded by natives of the Latvian office R&B literally one year prior to Amazing closing as the technology partner in the HRB direction. Now the main development team of HRB also passed into AGroup. In particular,Artur Apalis who earlier worked in R&B about 9 years and holding the country-manager's post, and then and the head of office Amazing Latvija was appointed the president of the company. Prepared new release of HRB of version 3.7 for this moment of AGroup and, besides, recovered a partner network on this product. Now it has 10 partners acting in the same 22 countries. At the same time part of partners are commands from the closed offices R&B, for example Septima (Ukraine), RBTs-group (Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan). Among other partners – Computime (Malta), Hogart Data Center (Poland), KCS (Kuwait), M2R Technologies (Canada), NetU (Greece and Cyprus), Synergy Software Systems (UAE).

In Russia HRB is engaged capital Info Industries Group (IIG) which is focused on services in the field of IT consulting and business process automation. This company entered the market in 2000 and Microsoft, SAP, IBM is engaged as products of third-party vendors, in particular, and advances own solutions – ULTOR (operational risk management of banks), IIG Retail (automation of process of rendering banking retail services), IIG BJet (planning and budget performance monitoring).

Now IIG is the only partner of AGroup in Russia on distribution, implementation and support of the HRB system. At the same time specialists in HRB from the former practice of Robertson & Blums in Russia passed into IIG. From the last IIG about 80 companies which use this system got. Among them more than 50% are the Russian customers (for example Bor Glassworks, "North-West Telecom", "Comstar-OTS" MTS, "With pleasure"), however an essential part is occupied also by international players – mentioned by Philip Morris, Kodak and also hotel chains Ritz Carlton Radisson SAS, the beer company Sun InBev , etc. Also users of a system are a number of banks, for example Transcapitalbank. Besides, IIG already managed to sign two agreements on implementation with new clients.

Systems capabilities

Now HRB is positioned as the full solution for personnel management and payroll for large and medium-sized enterprises which is able to provide difficult accounting and personnel management of the enterprise, work with staff lists, payroll of any complexity, a time recording and document flow of personnel. Main competitors of HRB are called SAP HR and Oracle HR, and main advantages – its localization under realities of the Russian market and speed of adaptation under changes of the Russian legislation (we will remind that the last is a sore point for SAP solutions and Oracle). Besides, in HRB the ability to integrate with platforms of Oracle, SAP, SunSystems (now Infor), Microsoft Dynamics NAV and AX, 1C is implemented.

Product development strategy means creation of a full-function product of human capital management (Human Capital Management) - HRB 5. It along with practices on administration management by personnel from the previous versions will include functionality of personnel management of strategic level that will allow to position a product as the solution for automation of all basic processes of human capital management at the enterprises. The HRB 5 platform using own environment of rapid development and deployment of LEAF (Lightweight Enterprise Applications Framework). According to the diagram, the release of HRB 5.1 will appear in the first quarter 2009, and final HRB 5.5 will be released in the fourth quarter 2010 – with complete functionality of HCM.