BrightHR vs. ShiftWizard vs. UKG Ready

I feel Bright HR is well suited to most small/medium sized businesses where they have a 'straight' forward resource set up. For larger businesses or for complex businesses similar to ourselves, where we operate 24 hours per day, rotational shift patterns, ambulatory staff, locums etc...we have to 'fudge' the way we use the information sometimes to make it work for us.

Incentivized

I might recommend UKG to a larger organization than ours. The complexity is rich, but perhaps it is too powerful a tool for what we need. That or it's a bit messy in its construction, having so many tools available but difficult to find or not working appropriately. UKG Ready processes payroll efficiently and with ease, but unless you are using a simple accounting platform it may not be able to easily integrate with yours

Incentivized

• BLIP is working very well. Staff find it easy to use and the geo-fencing that can be set up is very useful.
• Reporting, in particular reporting of Absence. We run this monthly and the information we can download is flexible and useful.
• Sick analysis - helps in controlling absence.
• Holiday planning and authorization is very helpful and details including date booked helps manage requests.

Incentivized

• Support—UKG support, from the Account Managers to CSMs to Ready Support, is amazing. They are always willing to help!
• Documentation—UKG has built-in online documentation, which is a live, easy-to-use version of a very lengthy manual.
• Ease of use- the system is intuitive, easy to train others to use.

Incentivized

• Notifications for requests should be optional based on individual employees. For example an admin won’t necessarily want every staff members leave requests by email and push notification. The settings only currently allow for notifications for everyone or no one. Being assigned as a manager may not allow data viewing required of wider staff.
• Toil should automatically be accrued into a balance if the employees clocked in time amounts to more than the target hours. It shouldn’t have to be calculated and requested.
• When reviewing hours worked for the week, the history calculation should take into account approved leave and sickness etc. I have a staff members target of 37 hours, but if their hours show 29 hours worked then I have to work out why they worked less. It should account for this if the absence is approved.

• We have had ongoing issues with our accruals.
• Auto generate timesheets in the "Team Timesheets" view.
• Granting manager access is cumbersome - access needs to be given in multiple places.
• The sync between Pro and Ready in my opinion is terrible and needs much improvement.
• Auto assign Employee Time Zones based on work location.

Incentivized

It's not entirely my decision - we are members of a 'community' of veterinary practices who have signed up to the contract with pensinusla and have bright hr as part of that contract however, I am usually involved in the tender process as I am one of the biggest users of both bright hr and the services from peninsula

Incentivized

We plan to renew our support and use of UKG Ready each year unless it becomes unavailable or the district seeks another vendor. As of now, there are no plans to changes vendors. The district staff is now familiar with using UKG. Another vendor will need to meet the same expectations we have come to enjoy with using UKG

Incentivized

Great modern interface and mostly intuitive but feels like it needs a bit more functionality or improvement to be truly intuitive. For example, you get a notification that you have an overtime request, you click it and it doesn't take you to the page where you can authorize the request and when you do navigate to the right place and action the request, you still have to go back to notifications and mark the request as complete and remove it.

UKG is the platform with the best overall usability on both an admin and user side. Employees find it easy to update personal information, the dashboards are clear and easy to follow, and the navigation of it is also easy to follow. Overall my favorite platform to use and learn more about.

Incentivized

The system seems very stable. Being hosted in the cloud, we are vulnerable to internet speeds and busy times. The system has been down a couple times over the 3 months we have been live, but Kronos resolved the issues very quickly. To have access from a desktop, tablet, time clock, or phone app is one of the best features....users have almost NO REASON they can't clock in.

Incentivized

We were always told that Kronos was the best, but there are reports that we got out of ADP and other payroll providers that we cannot get out of Kronos. One example is a report of Productive/Non-productive hours by department. We also need the dollar amount associated with the hours. This is information that is required on our cost report and we were told that that report is unavailable. It is very frustrating when I can't get what I need.

Incentivized

The team are proactive, having an advocacy team is just amazing and a great way to really understand their product roadmap and have input into useful features or feedback

Incentivized

If I was only rating support itself that would be a 10. Every support case I have entered has been addressed efficiently and with the desired result. On the implementation and transition to support there were multiple issues that those doing the implementation or transition could not answer or workflows and various settings left undone only to be discovered later. We implemented 3 different modules and the expertise we got for each one varied widely.

Incentivized

Our in-person training was a hybrid. Live online training with an instructor. They were very knowledgeable of the product & the area they were training on. I asked several specific questions and if they didn't know the answer immediately they followed up after class.

Incentivized

Pretty good online training, you have many how to options and can watch them several times. It can be hard at times to dig through the amount of data online but can usually find what you are looking for. Also you can download documentation for setting up the profiles and policies.

Incentivized

it was fairly easy to do but timely as i had to enter everything from scratch - i didn't at the time realise how important it was to set up the variable or fixed working pattern correctly given future changes as this is very tricky once it has been set up and i wished i had been aware that sometimes you can't make future changes without deleting the whole profile and starting again

Incentivized

Make sure the people who are doing the build have extensive knowledge on employment law and asking the right questions. I would bet that the people who helped with our builds did not read any of our employment contracts or ordinances; and when I asked questions about how other companies handled certain basic dictates from federal employment laws, they didn't have any idea what FMLA, FLSA, etc were.

Incentivized

I chose BrightHR as it offered a one-stop platform for HR management for which we have dedicated UK and ROI HR specialists who not only give HR advice but also write policies and handbooks, etc. They are a one-stop-shop, which was very important as when I signed the contract I did not have an HR person in my team and they were essentially my back office. Also, by signing up, I got access to Bright Safe too; which is great as again it's a one-stop-shop for Health and Safety in the workplace. So I can roll out toolbox talks, training, and accident management.

Incentivized

We currently use Paycom and are extremely dissatisfied with the lack of functionality and poor customer service. Rippling and ADP were other vendors we evaluated who performed well and offer a lot of functionality but we decided UKG was the best fit for our needs now and to scale with our strategic growth plans.

Incentivized

Thus far we are able to add as many users as necessary, implement 3 different bargaining units, 5 different types of user groups. Very flexible.

Incentivized

• Able to reduce one member of staff in personnel from 5 days to 3 days.
• Able to reduce time spent by payroll on holiday records significantly and improve accuracy significantly.
• Able to improve control of sick absence and improve record keeping.
• BLIP meant we did not need to buy expensive attendance software.
• Looking at possible use of payroll and other aspects of Bright HR not used at present.

Incentivized

• This is basic, but we finally know how many employees we have! It sounds ridiculous, but prior to UKG Ready we were on a payroll system that's reports were only as accurate as the last payroll cycle, so they were always 2 weeks behind and static. UKG Ready allows for realtime, daily reporting of information.
• We are able to get salary data for our various locations to be able to compare them to each other, as well as across our "competitors" and external competition.
• The data provided allows us to be able to understand the trends at individual locations including attrition, advancement, raise information, and other data points that we haven't historically done comparisons on
• We can see the demographic and geographical information for our employees and the benefits that they elect