Companies truly profit from absence management when they attack the direct and indirect costs that threaten their bottom lines today. As we've shown, many companies now are seeing their absence-related costs rise to enormous-even unsustainable-levels. But they cannot succeed in today's hyper-competitive markets if their profits are as absent as their employees.

To address this mounting challenge, companies will have to confront the key barriers that now undermine performance on the employee management front. They must confront poor data visibility, fragmented business processes, and increasingly complex policies and regulations.

The solution lies in total absence management-a strategy that promises to address the costly impact of employee absences. Through this approach, companies can:

• Simplify absence and leave management reporting
• Centralize all absence and related leave information into a single source
• Integrate and automate absence business processes from end to end
• Organize that information into a robust, flexible, and comprehensible case management structure
• Consistently comply with leave policies and regulation