An employee at your 12,000-person accounting firm makes a vacation request. Do you hear your bottom line sinking?

You'd better, especially considering that you spend an average of $80 to process a single human-resources (HR) transaction and $1,500 a year to administer HR for each employee. And those costs are just maintenance; they don't begin to account for how to align staff behind business goals, or, scarier still, make sure they're happy.

So you've decided to make a technology investment in your most valuable commodity: employees. A human capital management (HCM) system is an enterprisewide HR platform that manages everything from payroll and benefits to recruiting and staff deployment. HCM vendors such as PeopleSoft Inc. and Oracle Corp. have established a good track record for reducing HR costs at other companies, so you're optimistic that your investment will pay off. Your challenge will be to convert your patchwork of legacy systems and old-world HR expectations to the Web-based, employee-driven HCM approach.

A consultant will help your project team manage that transition, which will focus as much on educating your staff as it will on customizing and gradually rolling out the dozens of application modules that comprise the all-in-one HCM platform. While many companies outsource HCM, a system for a company of your size will need a fair amount of tweaking; so you've decided to host and support the application yourself. And while HCM vendors talk about reducing HR costs by as much as 75%, you could repay your investment within a year if you saved one-third of that.

Now go ahead and finish filling out that vacation request—you've earned it, or you willl soon.