Disadvantages of Best of Breed: The Pros and Cons

The disadvantages of Best of Breed HR applications are: 

❐ The potential cost of evaluating all options within a given market to identify the most appropriate software may be prohibitive. In the HR market, there are many potential providers with very different offerings, which can confuse or delay selection decisions. 

❐ Perhaps the strongest argument against Best of Breed applications is that they are often produced by small, start-up organisations that initially get a good foothold in the market, become popular but cannot then sustain the growth needed. This has been particularly true of highly specialised providers that operate in niche markets – for example, when flexible benefits initially became popular, several small providers launched web-based systems to support flex and many subsequently went out of business, leaving customers with unsupported systems. The solution is to thoroughly check the financial status of any software vendor.

❐ The need for the organisation to acquire a different set of skills to support specialised software. Increasingly, support contracts are available to minimise the burden of maintaining these skills; organisations are also turning to cloud-based solutions to transfer the organisational system management overhead outside the business. 

Advantages of Best of Breed: The Pros and Cons

The advantages of Best of Breed HR applications are: 

❐ Best of breed software providers are typically quicker to respond to market trends and the requirements of particular sectors. 

❐ Each Best of Breed component can be implemented as a stand-alone application. This incremental approach subjects the organisation to smaller amounts of change, reducing organisational trauma. 

❐ Best of Breed HR software contains an inherent best practice business model that is specific to the function rather than the overall flow of organisational data. As such, HR functions have greater freedom to review business processes and change their approach and organisation structure. 

❐ Although integration is often cited as a reason for selecting ERP, the reality is that integration need not be complicated or expensive. In an HR context, most organisations need only 10-12 key integration points to link the HR / Payroll system to Finance (for example transferring transactions to the General Ledger and providing basic data to populate headcount tables).