Brightmine (formerly XpertHR) is a global provider of people data, analytics and insight. Brightmine is a division of LexisNexis Data Services, within RELX®, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools. RELX serves customers in 180+ countries with 35,000+ employees.
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UKG Ready
Score 7.4 out of 10
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The UKG Ready® software suite is a centralized HCM solution designed for small to mid-sized businesses. It automates and streamlines HR, payroll, benefits, time, talent, and scheduling processes. UKG Ready's suite of tools offer actionable insights while helping to ensure compliance. Using AI, it draws on work, people, and culture data to boost efficiency and productivity. For example, UKG Ready streamlines core HR functions by centralizing…
Brightmine is well suited for UK employment law guidance, policy interpretation, and complex employee relations scenarios requiring quick, reliable insight. It is less appropriate for country specific advice outside the UK or for highly bespoke legal matters that require formal external legal counsel. In these cases you would still require external legal counsel.
UKG Ready is a terrific platform for companies with a dedicated individual or team to administer the solution. Reporting is robust, and the solution is very powerful when workflows and access are configured appropriately. Training for administrators is thorough and also time intensive. Small teams with limited capacity to learn the system and complete trainings during implementation will take longer to get up to speed with all the features and may struggle with troubleshooting issues without Support. Our small team continued to make some manual changes until we could learn more about the tools that could automate the activity (implementing cost of living adjustments on each employee's anniversary date, for example). As a result, some of our processes took longer in the new platform until we could either gain more experience in the solution, complete the trainings, or get help from support. UKG Ready is a powerful, sophisticated solution that allows customization to meet most needs. Multi-layered activities that may assign tasks or "to do items" and also require multiple approvers can be accomplished with UKG Ready. These robust features will also require thoughtful planning and configuration in workflows and/or security profiles to ensure automating these activities is seamless.
Have a 50 state chart that lists all final pay requirements for a deceased employee.
Policy requirements that are 100% mandatory for the handbook. This could be adjusted to make it crystal clear what is really needed and what an employer may want to add.
Chat support. I don't think this feature has ever worked on the site.
Learning and training is poor and has not provided our team with a way to approach our problems in a cost-effective and meaningful way
Consistent glitches in some areas result in errors that persist through multiple payrolls despite a thorough review of all settings
Reports don't live in the same place, multiple types of reports exist in multiple places with little explanation of the difference. We often build custom reports only to have them disappear or have to spend a long time trying to find them.
Without realising it we use Brightmine so often and it is so beneficial as our daily roles are onerous. By having a tool there that covers such a wide variety of products we can rest assured we know if we need something we can find it on there easily. With no hassle.
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
The website is so easy to use and navigate through. I check this website weekly on the states I am responsible for, and it is so well organized to quickly find those states. I also use this to check up on information with policies and laws I run into and all the information is quick and easy to find.
We have been very happy with the product. Occasionally, there are things we run into that do not seem so clear, yet the customer service provided by UKG community and service cases is unparalleled. Their specialists have been great to take the time to walk us through how to properly set up open enrollment and we appreciate the written follow up from the service cases so we can save the instructions.
It is almost always available when I need it. I have only ran into 2 situations where I received an error message and could not get logged in but was told this was a widespread issue that would quickly be resolved.
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.
Everything loads quickly and is exactly where I need it to be. I like how the sidebar breaks down different sections of policies for each state to help me find what I am looking for or gives suggestions or documents to review that may also be helpful
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.
The initial support was brilliant with a colleague who showed us how to use the platform, as the platform is so easy to navigate we havent had further support but i know if i needed any i could contact brightmine to offer the support. It is so easy to use so havent needed to
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.
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.
The people on the call training us were very friendly and knowledgeable! They helped me learn of new tabs for finding templates to create new trainings to update departments on policies and procedures. It also has great excel sheets so I can see side by side differences between states regarding different laws and compensation changes.
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.
I didnt implement but just wanted to say the person providing the training was brilliant and guided us through each page so we knew how to navigate, also allowed us to ask a lot of questions if we needed to which was helpful. So we could go away with confidence to use it
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.
HR Inform's documents are written a little better but there is less choice, they are similar in pricing however you can get a discount is you are a CIPD member which is attractive. It would be good if Brightmine can partner with the HR Ninjas very large network and give discounts to members, this would definitely drive subscriptions up for Brightmine and increase their presence.
UKG is much easier to use and customize for our business needs. I enjoy that the time piece is directly connected with the payroll function. This is something that we didn't see when working with Paylocity. There was a manual time data upload that we needed to process into the Payroll function to process payroll. UKG has this setup and it's just a click of a button, so simple!
Brightmine reduces the time it would take me to research certain items on my own. As a consultant, this increases my capacity, allowing me to take on additional clients and increase my revenue.
Using Brightmine saves me from needing to hire someone to help me perform research or to help me stay up-to-date on changing laws. Although I pay for the service, it is at least 80% less than an employee would cost.
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
