Business leaders, HR professionals, and technology experts recently gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa, to explore how organisations can adopt technology to navigate rising regulatory complexity while building more connected, high-performing workforces.
According to a statement, SAP HR Connect brought together a community of HR leaders to discuss how digital technologies are helping organisations reduce compliance risk, streamline operations, and unlock more strategic value from their people functions.
The Managing Director for Southern Africa at SAP, Nazia Pillay, said the South African employment landscape is at a critical point.
“Public and private sector companies are racing to unlock the power of AI and cloud technologies to improve their competitiveness and build capacity for future innovation. Every organisation needs an active, motivated, and fully enabled workforce to realise full value from business transformation initiatives.
At a time when demand for certain skills is at an all-time high, companies are increasingly leveraging powerful human capital management technologies to attract, retain, and empower their employees,” he said.
The Head of SAP HCM for MEA South, Manishwar Tiwary, stated that HR teams are operating in a fundamentally different environment today, saying, “Compliance is no longer a periodic exercise but a continuous, data-driven discipline. Organisations that continue to rely on spreadsheets and fragmented systems without leveraging the power of AI-driven innovations are exposing themselves to unnecessary risk and inefficiency.
Tiwary said manual systems make it difficult to maintain accurate, up-to-date employee records, track compliance requirements, and produce reliable audit trails.
“They also consume a significant portion of HR capacity, limiting the ability of teams to focus on higher-value activities such as talent development, workforce planning, and employee experience. As compliance requirements grow more complex, the need for integrated, digital HR systems is becoming more urgent,” Tiwary added.
A 2025 PwC global study reportedly found that 82 per cent of companies are planning to invest more in technology to drive compliance activities, a clear signal that the limitations of manual approaches have reached a tipping point.
Speaking, the Group Human Capital Chief Operating Officer at Sanlam, Ravika Bandyopadhyay, said, “We have adopted an ambidextrous strategy for our digital and data transformation journey, simultaneously exploiting operational excellence, proficiency, and efficiency in our current landscape while exploring incremental innovation that enhances and elevates the user experience while driving the longer-term transformation journey focused on leveraging intelligent, transformative technology to drive business value.”
It was added that by digitising HR processes and documents, organisations can create a single source of truth for employee and organisational data, including positions, time tracking, and cost centres, ensuring information is accurate, consistent, and always up to date.
The Chief Operating Officer of Discovery People at Discovery Ltd, Kammy Sing, noted that shared services is a catalyst for reinvention, stressing, “When data, technology, and people are fully integrated, organisations don’t just scale but evolve, creating platforms for growth, innovation, and long-term impact.”
Tiwary added that “digitisation should go beyond efficiency to enable HR to play a more strategic role in the business. When compliance is embedded into systems and processes, HR teams are freed up to focus on developing talent, strengthening culture, and driving long-term organisational performance.”
