CONCORD, Mass., April 15, 2008 — A new national study conducted by the Gantry Group LLC, HR/Workforce Management Solutions Expenditures & Trends, reveals that a company’s annual budget for HR/Workforce Management solutions and services, on average, will grow to $1.14 million in the next 12 months. Companies will allocate their budgets in key solution areas: 13% to recruitment, 11% to leadership & development, 12% to performance management, 10% to compensation planning, and 9% to talent management. Companies show a preference for third party remotely hosted solutions: 67% of planned recruitment implementations (32% on-premise, 35% remotely hosted), 49% of planned performance management deployments, and 44% of planned talent management deployments.
According to the study, the cost of customer satisfaction tracking programs is rationalized more by high customer satisfaction scores (25%) than increased revenue (18%), reduction in customer churn (12%) or increased repeat sales (9%).

According to the study, respondents prefer 3rd party solutions to outsourced services primarily because they want to maintain control (70%), and believe that they will also derive greater cost savings (50%).

The study solicited feedback from C-level HR executives and Vice Presidents (28%), HR Directors (32%) and HR Managers (24%). Over two-thirds (67%) of study respondents were with companies with over 1,000 employees, and 34% were with companies with over 10,000 employees.
The study revealed the following additional findings:

• The key metrics that companies use to determine the success of their HR solutions is reduced administrative burden on HR staff (45%), followed by improved HR productivity (39%), and lower operational costs (37%).
  


• The majority of respondents believe that there HR solution deployments have benefited their organizations through reduced HR time expended on benefits enrollment and administration (61%), and reduced time allocated to payroll processing (49%).
  


• Respondents are least satisfied with their deployed solutions for Talent Management, Performance Management and Manager Self-Service.
  


• Dissatisfaction with HR solutions arises from primarily from vendors’ poor response to problems (46%), poor integration with the company’s infrastructure (41%), poor performance (38%), and an increase in HR process complexity (36%).
  

About Gantry Group    
Gantry Group is a strategic consulting firm that guides technology-based solution providers to build offerings that capitalize on urgent market needs and challenges. For the past decade, Gantry Group’s customer satisfaction, primary market research and ROI/TCO measurement services have armed the world’s leading technology vendors with targeted market intelligence to support their strategic business decisions and inform their solution roadmaps. Backed by over 25 years of experience, Gantry Group delivers to business executives the firsthand customer metrics, market insights and predictive measurement capabilities that allow them to accurately quantify the business opportunity and position themselves to seize the greatest market share. Additional information about Gantry Group can be found at Additional information about Gantry Group can be found at www.gantrygroup.com.

For study results, please call Gantry Group at 978-371-7557 ext 18, or click here to download directly.

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