ADP WorkForce Suite vs. Oracle Simphony POS Systems

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.

In my experience, there has not been a resolution on outstanding tickets opened two years ago during the initial implementation. Simple things like time reporting, creating buttons, and marking items as "unavailable" have issues. The system has a lag when servers log out of checks that prevents them from opening the checks on another terminal without a wait that feels like an eternity in the restaurant industry and with direct impact to the guest. Good luck calling support. Most of my experience involves the person I spoke with having no idea how to fix my issue and having to "escalate the ticket." This escalation process will last weeks, months, and in our case, years with no resolution.

• 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

• Real time sales
• Real time labor costs
• Integration with account software

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

• Support is awful. Oracle does not directly support end-users and depends on resellers to offer support. So if there is a bug or breaking change, we have to jump through hoops to get something fixed.
• Does not play well with other software or interfaces. There are interfaces but they lack a serious amount of features that are crucial to our business.
• The guest facing hardware does not hold up to constant use very well.
• The backend hardware is lacking in PCI compliance and is not meant for enterprise use.
• The software itself looks as if it is stuck in the early 2000s and there has been no sign of an update in many years.
• Reporting is difficult to set up and use and you have to rely on third-party reporting to get decent usable reports.

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.

Extremely knowledgeable staff that truly care about our business processes

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.

We've stayed with MICROS mainly due to that's how we've always operated and to switch operating POS systems would be a HUGE learning curve for everyone involved.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Micros has allowed us to leverage our margin by using our own credit processor and loyalty program. We've seen success from both of these platforms (not Micros) and have been able to save money on the extra costs of using Micros.

Incentivized