Factorial and SoftwareOne launch partnership to accelerate global growth

A consultative approach

“We bring a consultative approach and focus on understanding the needs of our clients, so we can offer them a bundle where they only pay for what they need. Factorial is very easy to use and to set up, solely focusing on that SME segment. With the high level of customization possibilities of the platform, we are able to serve clients in more than 64 countries.

“We have a marketplace with some 80 integrations for HR consultants, payroll providers, or ERPs such as Microsoft’s Business Central, which is one of the most popular integrations that we have. So what you might call the second circle around Factorial is wide-ranging. Our Open API for custom integrations further optimizes the versatility of our HR platform.”

All this would count for little if the solution itself did not perform to best-of-breed standards. “Onboarding is very easy, not only for the HR department itself, but also for C-level, and employees. In general, the program is designed for the user to reach everything in two clicks.”

All companies that implement Factorial experience significant time savings around HR processes such as document management or the uploading of payroll slips. “The benefits are most dramatic for SMEs moving from offline pen and paper, as still happens,” says Molijn. “The digitization of HR processes takes away a lot of manual work and the possibility of human error. HR should not be an administrative department but focus as much as possible on people.”

Factorial takes this to the next level with the introduction of AI. “It’s so great,” says Molijn. “It adds to the biggest value that Factorial brings for our clients: making the right business decisions based on data and quick analytics. Instead of spending time on setting up different dashboards and graphs, you can just ask the AI function which employee took the most holidays, or which department saw the largest increase in expenses over the past year. And AI gathers the data and creates an insightful graph for you in a few seconds. Same with summarizing and suggestive action points, it’s already there in the performance reviews. And this is rolled out more and more within the platform. It’s run on Microsoft AI technology because, like SoftwareOne, we have very close ties with Microsoft and its ecosystem from Microsoft partners to integration with Microsoft’s product suite – Teams, Business Central, PowerBI, and so on.”

Factorial is investing heavily in partnerships; in the past two years, it has gone from five employees dealing with partners to an 80-strong team just focusing on the partnership element of its growth strategy.

“Of course, we wanted to speak with SoftwareOne. They are a big player and we got referred to them by the Microsoft ecosystem. They have a wide reach. SoftwareOne can bring us many partners as well. And we also like the combination of indirect and direct sales [on the SoftwareOne channel] because our go-to-market is to work directly with clients, but also with the partners of SoftwareOne.”

The partnership will create value in different ways. “If the conversation starts with the need for HR automation, you will get to know the company, and organically, you might get the opportunity to do a cloud migration or an AI project. Or it’s the other way around, where one of your ERP or cloud management clients starts looking for an HR solution.”