ADP WorkForce Suite vs. Cornerstone Galaxy

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.

Cornerstone Galaxy is a good solution for larger companies that focus on training and want to offer a variety of options to their employees and departments. It is highly customizable. It does require a tech savvy team to set-up, and maintain. This is not a set-it-and-forget-it system. From an LMS perspective, it wouldn't be my top choice for employees who only need a mobile-friendly approach.

• A lot flexibility in configuration of the system
• 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

• Ability to provide multiple customizable access roles from general end user to full system admin and anything in between
• Powerful reporting system in the LMS to track a plethora of data points within the platform (user data, training information, transcript information)
• Great options to customize the look and feel of your "home page" to best meet your company's needs and goals.
• Ability to customize the transcript view for learners (i.e. when Completed training will move to their Archived transcript, what to do with Inactive training on transcripts)

Incentivized

• Difficult to use
• Retroactive adjustments must be made by an administrator
• Delegation of duties must be done by an adminstrator
• Data must be exported and then imported into pay system, does not support interface
• Product has not changed or been updated in 4+ years

Incentivized

• Sometimes finding the right answer to your support question can be a bit more difficult than it should be.
• I would like to see more OSHA related courses.
• At times, the administrative interface seems to need to be updated, but the tradeoff honestly might be the absolute rock-solid stability of the platform.

Incentivized

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.

As long as pricing stays reasonable, we will likely stay with Cornerstone for at least one more contract renewal. It would be a large task to migrate all of our content to a new system. However, the LMS landscape is diversifying with new startups that are showing some real innovation.

Incentivized

Easy to use, easy to learn, lots of support during the learning process. There are a few parts of the system we don't use and I'm hesitant to begin using because other clients have said they're difficult and cumbersome (certifications) or outdated (libraries)

I haven't really had any major availability problems. The service is practically impeccable but it is true that at times, due to server and latency problems, the application has been slower. But these have been specific issues that have resolved themselves.

I haven't seen many issues at all with load times. Sometimes learning assignments will take longer then expected but it is still reasonable. They have taken great effort over the last couple years to speed things up like reports and search results so I expect that effort to continue in the coming year.

Incentivized

Extremely knowledgeable staff that truly care about our business processes

Its always important to have support when you are facing problems and when you are the main admin of the organization. Cornerstone Support is very supporting when you have not found the answer in the help guide. its very useful to have a team support to guide you.

Incentivized

we use also to admin all our training in person events and sessions. Its easy to admin this kind of trainings and automatize some processes we have. Also de user experience and the integration with other systems helps to the employees to use more. All modules integrated oriented to develop people is the principal reason to have CSOD. The training administration is very complete and allows to automate many processes.

The online modules are pretty good. You can access them at any time, which we have done. You learn a lot in the beginning, but having the ability to retake short lessons when you are working on those items was very helpful.

Incentivized

The implementation was pretty difficult. We felt they (Cornerstone) didn’t properly allocate the resources to complete our implementation in the timetable we wanted.

For example, we worked on Workday and SSO integrations - work that we had specifically contracted for in advance. When we were ready to work on that project, they didn’t have the people ready to help us, so it took a lot longer than necessary. That was my biggest pain point.

The implementation approach we went with was a self-led implementation. We would speak to the implementation manager once per week, and self-trained. We met with implementation manager to discuss issues, review things that we’d learned for 1 hour. We found that wasn’t enough. Other things would come up outside that one hour window that we couldn’t get answers to. We didn’t have anyone to ask about those things and we had to wait to ask during our weekly meeting.

The advantage of the self-led implementation approach was that it was really inexpensive – significantly less than the implementation cost for the other systems that we looked at. I also liked that we could pace ourselves. There were however big roadblocks. We would have to make sure the right resources were available. We had an implementation/project manager with a lot of experience and felt that the person was knowledgeable but missed on a few things.

In hindsight, I would still go with the self-led implementation, but knowing what I know now, I would ask for the integration person to be available more. I would work that into the contract. With single sign-on, we needed deep linking to build direct links through a Single Sign-On tool, e.g. when someone gets an email, it directs them to training. But it has to go through SSO to get them to the correct link. Deep linking wasn’t turned on in our system and they had to activate it. We encountered little things like that – sequencing pre-requisites which were problematic. We tried to troubleshoot ourselves.

I recommend you consider contracting for some extra implementation hours and determine when they are going to be available. Work it into the contract that you have the ability to call tech support during implementation. In addition to weekly implementation meetings, they have technical webexes – 4 every week, but 2 didn’t apply to us – one as we were using SSO. The challenge is they were not always relevant – we had specific questions that didn’t fall into those categories

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.

The user experience is a lot better than using SumTotal as an admin CSOD makes working easy. Without having workarounds. Reporting is a lot better than both platforms. Reporting in CSOD is complex however easy to manage and create when you understand the data points collected

Incentivized

It is important to be familiar with the terms and annual increases in licenses and other aspects of the contract. I recommend analyzing this from the beginning and the permanence is relevant because Cornerstone updates its modules and brings out new features that may allow you to leave a module to acquire another

It's a great product with some pieces that are set but many things that can be customized as needed for individual needs

Incentivized

As I have said before, I have no doubt that the services of the Cornerstone sales people were very good. In particular, our salesperson spent a lot of time in contact with us to make the process go smoothly. Perhaps being a large company in some cases the times were slowed down but it is something normal to take into account.

• 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.

• We are in the process of trying to increase employee engagement through content expansion. We are in the early stages of this.
• The Edge Import Tool, in conjunction with Reporting 2.0, has done a great job of helping to automate/semi-automate tasks for huge time savings.
• Maintaining compliance. Achieved through dynamic/automated groups, assignments, communication, and reporting.

Incentivized