First of all, can you introduce yourself to readers?
My name is Viktor Mečiar and I am the CEO at TULIP Solutions. I have been working in IT area since 2005, where I worked on IT projects in various positions and led them in Europe and around the world. I love TULIP since 2016 😊. At that time, we started as an independent company and I think that we are successfully moving in the Slovak and global IT world thanks to our own TULIP business platform.
TULIP is a cloud-based solution for employee attendance records, allowing for simple registration of absences with approval, as well as
comprehensive planning of changes. Part of the solution is also the issuing of pay slips in the employees´ accounts in TULIP, recording and billing of business trips and recording of benefits. At the same time, we are able to electronically cover various HR processes such as employee onboarding, changes in employment, including the generation of contractual documentation and so on.
How do you try to make with your solutions the work of HR staff easier? What are they most thankful for?
Definitely for the fact that they do not need to record attendance in Excel with complex macros. In TULIP, all recalculations are automatic in the background and the HR manager can rely on the employees that they won´t request anything, which is not in compliance with the legislation. We provide them with multiple reports that filter the data the way they want to see them. Thanks to TULIP, the HR manager has less work to do and, moreover, his results are more reliable. Of course, there is an automatic export of data to payroll software. No need to worry about the Labor Office inspections.
What advantages does your employee digital folder have?
In addition to the friendly user interface, we consider the greatest advantage to be the flexibility of setting up the structure of
employee folders and setting rights to individual folders. An employee can have an active access and provide certain data to HR, but also a passive access so that data can only be read. Of course, there is also a high data security in line with GDPR.
Another advantage is the possibility to digitize HR documents using OCR solution, where the required data is extracted and documents are automatically stored in the employee’s digital folder. This is a feature that is particularly interesting for large corporations and corporations that have huge amounts of HR documents. If a company wants a paperless office, this is one of the first steps.
Forwarding documents within the company and entering the same data for different purposes can take employees a lot of time and energy. Can you give examples of how documents or data in the digital folder can be shared across multiple systems?
I see the biggest benefit in a combination of documents, processes and in transferring responsibility for entering data from HR directly
to employee or candidate. For example, when an employee is being onboarded, we make it possible to send the relevant part of the electronic form using a secure form to the candidate’s email, who will fill in all relevant data, and then, after submitting by candidates, the data will come back to the HR department, where other data will be added, for example, for the automatic enrollment of an employee in the payroll system.
For what documents do companies usually use your approval system the most?
We have a separate Accounting module that manages both received and issued invoices. Data from them is extracted through a connected
OCR system, with TULIP containing a self-learning algorithm, so that the processing of data is improved with each invoice. Thus, most often, approval system is oriented towards accounting documents.
How can your electronic attendance system save time for your employees?
The decrease of unnecessary administration is mainly felt by the HR staff. Their job is to only approve and close attendance by one-click at
the end of the wage period for the entire company. Then the documents can be sent to the payroll software. That is all.
Employees, in particular, feel that they have a modern portal in which they have attendance records, pay slips, personal employee
folder, benefit records and support.
Why did you decide to introduce a benefit module into your portfolio of solutions?
The priority for us is to improve the HR part of the portal. In addition to attendance recording, we add modules, which clients ask for and
are missing them there. Logically we have chosen benefits, which thanks to the new legislation, have become a big topic of recent weeks. In addition, as we use TULIP ourselves in the company, we can assess its features from a user perspective.
How do you help companies to digitize their HR processes as quickly and smoothly as possible?
By combining our available technology and specific know-how, we can speed up the digitization. We have experience with companies of all
sizes and types, so we can advise our clients properly.
What trends in digitizing HR processes do you think will have the greatest impact on companies in the short and longer term?
The next step in digitization is certainly electronic signing.
The fact that at the moment we can have any document in a digital form is super, but in case of HR documents, for example, you have to
print and sign them anyway. So, if the legislation does not adapt, it is a half-job done.
We are currently analyzing the legal aspects of deploying electronic signatures on HR documents in our TULIP solution, and we plan to integrate it. We have also published this legal analysis on our blog: https://tulipize.sk/2019/05/27/ako-vyriesit-elektronicky-podpis-pri-digitalisation-work-repair-documentation/
Finally, what is your favorite quote?
Don’t teach the bird to fly.