APS vs. Workday Human Capital Management

APS Payroll is an easy to use payroll system, and integrates well with some things such as the APS Hire feature, which handles onboarding, and the eSelfServe timeclock feature. It exports well to Quickbooks, but is only ok with NetSuite. (It works but is a completely manual process and takes a lot of setup.) Our tax registration and filing has been fine and we're always apprised of any tax discrepancies such as small Unemployment overages/underages when filed compared to what was withheld.

Incentivized

I would say it's well suited in every environment because I think it does so much. It's like the holy grail of HRIS systems is what I like to call it because thinking about all parts of the employee lifecycle, it lives here in Workday Human Capital Management. So I love the fact that you can do the people data analytics, you can store employee records, the talent acquisition pieces there. I'm thinking I can't think of anything negative right now except for the fact that I can't drill down into the data for the people analytics side. Other than that, I think it's literally, yeah, the holy grail of HRIS systems, I love it and I would highly recommend it.

Incentivized

• It's fast and intuitive. Our previous contractors were ADP and Paychex and neither were intuitive. Our payroll runs have less errors now than with previous vendors. Payroll prep time is down from 5 hours with ADP to 2 hours with APS for the HR Manager.
• The limiters are great. I'm always afraid of that error that no one caught. Let's assume that you add a $200 limiter to overtime. Any time that a staff member is about to receive more than $200 in overtime for that pay period, a red flag goes up for the HR manager to double check.
• We have 3 programs in public schools that block certain ports. APS has a 2nd feature using GPS so that staff can only check in for their shift while they are in the designated GPS range. Great for someone who has to report to a remote location. Just add the GPS coordinates and they can't check until they get to the project.

• Groups employees in management hierarchies and creates Org Charts that are easy to navigate and allow for visualizing management chains regardless of employee locations
• Intuitive and easy to use. The Workday search functionality works very much like Google; one can search for anything that they have access to in the database and drill down into the various details. All information is connected through hyperlinks and users can easily keep digging into the details for as far as their security access would take them.
• Tasks such as to do, review or approve items are sent to the user's Workday Inbox, very much resembling email. Notifications about outstanding "to do" items are also sent to each the user's work email address on a daily basis.

Incentivized

• Reporting - We have six different business units and the reporting is separate for all three. Most reporting I do requires information from all business units so am running six reports and then copying and pasting to get the report I need.
• Multi-state taxes - We have a number of employees who live in New York and work in New Jersey. APS OnLine is designed to accommodate one state withholding so ability to have "worked in" state and "lived in" state taxes withheld went away. This was a shortfall.
• The Carrier connection setup took much longer than expected. After a year, we are still having some issues with some items transferring over to the GL.
• The CA overtime calculation does not calculate after 8 hours per day, only on the 40 per week so we override each week.
• Reporting - when running Benefit reports, it recognizes employees who formerly carried the plan but may have dropped it. To get around this, we have to delete off the employee's record so the history is not readily available.

Incentivized

• Should have more option in time sheet like choose project code or something.
• On The pay page, it should have options to view past salaries; it may be there already but not in the version that I use.
• The employee information page does not have a back button to navigate to the previous page.

I have been using the system for over a year now and feel more comfortable with the functionality of it. I have just recently implemented the benefit administration portion.

Incentivized

It is work to make one system the source of truth for our data, but now that it is done, there is less work involved in staying on this path. This means for us that maintaining and/or implementing new modules like performance, finance, talent, etc. is simple. It's a no-brainer

Incentivized

The APS Payroll software is very easy to use, and it is easy to train new employees on it. The APS Payroll support team is very helpful and response time is quick. It is easy to enter/change employee information, adjust salaries and benefits, etc. New features have also been added that makes it even better, such as being able to set up your own income/deduction items.

Incentivized

Workday's on a great path in terms of user experience. Their goals is to deliver a use experience that doesn't require training or instruction, like Amazon on the consumer side for example. That's hard to do when you're talking about complex business processes and important and sensitive employee information, but they're doing it well

Incentivized

I haven't had any outages

Incentivized

In 2014, Workday has changed the update process. There will be two updates a year; the updates will be delivered to customers typically in a 24 hour window during these two weekends a year. They also keep the Community up-to-date about any planned outages, etc. There is weekly scheduled downtime on Friday night.

Very quick

Incentivized

From my perspective, the system runs like a well oiled machine and I have not had any issues with customers complaining about speed. If a report is taking long to run, the report can run in the background and you can go about your business. For larger enterprises, there is additional space and machines to process the application in what Workday refers to it as Extended Configuration Tenant

I had to learn APS on my own, and the support team held my hand. They are still there when I have an occasional question. Anytime I need support, I can call my rep or send an email and help is on the way, without failure. The support team is awesome

Incentivized

Workday is still learning about the needs of higher education. I have seen rapid improvement in support and knowledge over the last year so am confident this will continue to improve. Overall however, I have found the Support Team to be extremely responsive and Workday offers the advantage of having support across several timezones so that we never wait more than a few hours for a response.

Even if it wasn't in-person on location, we felt like we had our trainer in the room with us.

Incentivized

Some training is offered online. Cost is per-person. This also gets quite expensive. Training doesn’t follow a logical path A to B. Starts in middle. When you try to do it afterwards at your desk, difficult.
• Training scenarios are not very real

We had great webinars.

Incentivized

I have done for report writing and mass imports (EIBs). They give materials and you run through examples, i.e. you don’t just watch them do tasks, so that is helpful. Training is expensive – a single reporting writing class is $600 per person for virtual training

It would have been helpful to understand the phases of the implementation up front so I could have prepared differently for enrollments, billing, and transfer of information to payroll. At the end of the day, I'm happy with the selection and the system and anticipate I will like it better as we go along. We have done a number of other system implementations in the past few years, and this has been pretty painless, however, I've had a few surprises.

Incentivized

It was implemented before my joining the company. At my last company, we used Workday professional services.

Based upon my experience at my last company, I would rate the implementation experience an 8/10. There are different ways to set things up and we had different people telling us different things. It set us back a couple of times.

Regarding configuration advice, we could set things up where every manager has supervisory organizations, or have it financially based i.e. aligned to cost center/department. We chose the individual manager path and I think we should have chosen a department route. Going down the individual manager path, to maintain the information, we have to inactivate a supervisory org whenever a manager changes/leaves.

We had used ADP for years and had always struggled with their customer service. With over 20 locations (20+ W2s, quarterly filings, etc) we had a lot of questions. We would have to call and sit on hold for long periods of time to talk to someone who couldn't always answer our questions. Then we would get different answers from different people or have to re-explain our issue. It was a major time suck for my employees and they dreaded having to call all of the time. For us - the final straws for us to switch providers were: +Numerous year end filings with incorrect names and addresses (they couldn't keep our 20+ locations separate even though our paperwork was completed correctly) +Incorrect SUI rates for several locations that resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in overpayments which was a lot of money for small hotels. We had sent in numerous requests for them to fix this but it never happened +Lack of care - even though we were having all of these issues, nobody would work with us to get them all resolved and make sure to remedy the situation. We had to seek out a manager to get them resolved but even after this, we still had more issues. Overall - DON'T stick with ADP or even think about switching to them. They might be able to slash prices but their poor customer service and lack of care will cost you in the end. It's not worth it. APS does everything ADP had the capability of but we don't have the errors or headaches we did before. I am really looking forward to this year end!

Incentivized

Workday is an incomplete product, by this I mean it must work alongside other products and does not work by itself. Trying to make several different products work smoothly together becomes very challenging. As compared to ADP products, when purchased all together work very well all together. Also, ADP has extensive Training programs and extensive Customer Support. So ADP's products are far superior to Workday's products in my opinion.

Incentivized

I've never had a problem with the system nor in finding the right information.

Incentivized

Workday has released Financials and is continuing to develop it's Human Capital Management footprint with the addition of Workday Recruiting. I think customers will find that is easy to add on additional functionality in the system. Workday does make it easy for customers to make changes without relying on IT resources. The Business Process framework is a visual tool that allows functional resources to make changes and see the flow of the transaction

• We were able to transition quickly and continue to successfully hire and onboard new hires for several Clubs that opened within weeks of moving to APS.
• We do struggle a bit with the ease of reporting simply because our locations are all under separate EIN and that can make it difficult to easily combine data queried under custom reports, so the volume of reporting that I might wish to be able to push through weekly in order to help address 'real time' trends is not always available.
• The lack of effective dating for position and wage changes does mean that HR and available APS data is not 'real time' accurate and that HR does need to return to the system to update changes well after-the-fact, which is not ideal.

Incentivized

• Positive ROI, we were one of the first organizations that went with Workday HCM, and we received numerous discounts. Cloud systems are the way to go and we feel the system is stable for our growing work force.
• The user conferences have been helpful to network and learn more deepness in the modules and functionality.
• Right off the bat, our implementation costs were lower than budgeted and we had less 'billing' surprises.

Incentivized