Adobe Workfront, acquired by Adobe in late 2020, is a web-based project-management tool. It is designed for both IT and marketing teams, but can be implemented for any kind of project. Workfront offers all the features standard to project management platforms, as well as resource allocation, automation, and agile workflow.
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WorkForce Suite
Score 4.0 out of 10
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The WorkForce Suite, by WorkForce Software, is a mobile-first, cloud-based modern workforce management solution with integrated employee communications and collaboration capabilities. The WorkForce Suite aims to help global enterprise organizations optimize their labor, protect against compliance risks, and maximize productivity while building a highly engaged, resilient, and agile workforce.
I write music and sound design for multiple projects at the same time, all within the same company, sometimes as much as 8-10. It can be hard to keep track of and stay on top of notes and changes, but Adobe Workfront is great at keeping everything organized, and informing you of deadline changes as they occur.
EmpCenter is really well suited for companies with minimal variety in time keeping needs. Certainly somewhere that has fairly regular work schedules and operational needs the system would be programmed for and meet those needs quite well. I think they assert themselves as a product specifically for those more complex companies, and I believe it is one of a few products available for companies with many employee types and complex work schedule and pay needs, but because of those complexities each have their own specific customizations I feel it is difficult for the company to then manage the different products that end up existing. Each ends up being unique so applying large scale changes doesn't work well as something we may request and need if applied over EmpCenter in general may cause problems for another company. Therefore everything has to be done on an individual basis and is more time consuming and costly.
works well with other systems. We were able to collect data from another time system, Avaya phone systems and even a point of sale system with not a lot of difficulty.
They know their product and integration points. They were able to troubleshoot problems with hardware time collection devices quite quickly. We found the devices they sold to be quite durable.
Out of the box they have more reports than I would have anticipated. Creating new reports was sometimes a task if it was complex but there were usually similar reports you could use as a starter template
All that I've said already is why. I suppose the clearest way to say it is that at this point? I cannot imagine running the 300+ active projects in eMarketing without AtTask; it simply wouldn't be possible and even more; I wouldn't imagine why we'd try to find an alternative tool when we have one meeting our needs.
After spending close to 5 years to decide on which payroll product to acquire for our University, I cannot image we would switch now that we have it in use.
I gave a rating of 10 on overall usability because Workfront is cloud based and very easy to use. Workfront also provides collaboration on projects which is critical to a projects success. The tool gives everyone high level visibility in their projects down to the smallest detail. Wonderful project management system, allows you to cut down on emails, meetings and no more spreadsheets for tracking your projects.
Maintenance is required, but usually after work hours, Some days the proofing tool function is not operational, but this is a new function of the tool that WF is working out. the kinks on. Chrome is the best browser to use the system in and we find Firefox and Explorer lose some view functionality - Gantt Chart, Resource Grid
Workfront's performance has been very good. Everything always feels very fast and snappy in my experience. We have integrated it with custom scripts to create folder structure for media managing our projects. It works very well.
It would be nice if the support forms were more dynamic so you could add more information to the support ticket when you enter it to reduce back and forth with the support team member. Also communication on escalated tickets isn't always great. It's gotten better over the years but still needs improvement. Other than that, initial response on support tickets is really quick and the people I've dealt with have always been very professional.
The training is very easy to use and you can simply choose the topics included in the course(s) that are most important to your training needs. After each training course, you are tested on what you have learned. If you need a refresher course, they provide Course Catalogs as well as instructor-led courses & workshops.
Most people learn as you go, a lot of this stuff requires trial and error throughout so my suggestion is to provide as much information in the upfront and keep it as simple as possible. You can add other tools and features as you go but everyone should have the basics down so no bad habits can start to develop. Be persistent with everyone, and don't be afraid to correct and talk through steps again so everyone is on the same page
Jira is mostly used as a bug locking tool or to track any new development for any specific region/EPIC. But Workfront has a lot of other features which are beneficial in project management. I still consider Jira and Workfront my top two options for project management and believe both have some of the other useful features which are required to manage any team.
EmpCenter is a new software to the company however, I only trained on the old software for a few months before EmpCenter was introduced. I think EmpCenter has a smoother data entry process and can run more in depth reports, but since this is the system I know best I cannot accurately compare it to previous software.
As I stated earlier, I didn't have to pay for Workfront myself- I'm a user under a large organization. I know it's not cheap to implement, I don't know how the price scales for a small-business, but I do like the product enough that I'm going to look into it in the future for my own company.
Our organization has thousands of users that use Workfront and it seems to hold up very well. I have not encountered any issues using it and I think it makes it very easy for multiple people to be involved in a project and keep things organized and clear for everyone involved.
Workfront allowed our company to have multiple offices and work remote and still have projects continually move through the agency
The platform allowed streamlined project management needs so PMs could look at a higher level of timing for resourcing needs for a given team
Workfront's ease of integration with other tech allowed for a lot of flexibility to meet the needs of individual wants/needs so that each person could do their best work
EmpCenter has reduced the amount of time administrators are spending on payroll. Certainly it has made our entry to our pay system more efficient since we can simply load the data from the time keeping system and we are not collecting actual physical signatures and paper timesheets that must be reviewed for accuracy and completeness. The system does this for us and some automatic calculating of certain pay due that we were hand adding. However the feedback I am getting is that the supervisors feel their work has been increased greatly. They are spending more time correcting and approving time. Essentially the work we were doing in our central offices to review and correct time the supervisor must now do as they approve the time. We have now asked them to be more responsible for proper reporting and use which requires they know more about the rules and many different aspects of pay than they had before. We have employees who are union represented and get some benefits from the contract others do not receive, contract employees who have certain pay aspects in their contracts that must be known, as well as temporary employees and students who get very different pay from the other employees. While some things have been programmed for the system to know and handle, some things must be added to the time sheet to pay properly or the way time is reported is different (some clock out for lunch some don't) supervisors must now know these differences while that used to be a role that was more mine as an administrator. Now I just help them and audit and review.
