Red Wing Software headquartered in Minnesota offers a benefits administration and payroll solution, in their software CenterPoint Payroll.
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Workday HCM
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Workday Human Capital Management is built as a cloud-based system with global consistency in user experience. Workday HCM is part of a broader system with other Workday products.
CenterPoint Payroll has been excellent for our company, with approximately 150 employees. I can certainly see it being excellent for smaller companies and larger companies. I don't know if there is a size of company at which it would become difficult or limiting to use - I can't foresee any of the functions or features becoming limiting factors as company size increases. To a certain extent, I could see the robustness of CenterPoint being a bit more than what is necessary for a tiny company of less than 5 employees, but it would certainly be able to do what is required for them.
Workday human capital management is well suited for organizations to manage their employee records. It is also well suited for managing the employee's salary details, also the details of past salary changes, promotions, etc. It has options to keep track of employees' goals for the year, where they can keep track of their progress, and also managers can view the progress or share feedback. This is very helpful for tracking career progress and providing feedback. Other options, like training assigned to employees, can also be seen in Workday; users will get alerts by email for any new assignments or due assignments, etc.
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.
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
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
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.
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
CenterPoint support is excellent! While I have not had to use them frequently, as the program is consistently stable and has few, if any, bugs, the times I have had to reach out to tech support, they have been excellent and have solved our issues quickly. They listen to our explanation of the problems, can dial into our system to see exactly what we're seeing in real time, and have always been able to quickly determine the issue, work out a solution, and help us through the process until we've got everything back in line. They are friendly, courteous, professional, kind and very knowledgeable of their products. This is absolutely one of the best things about CenterPoint - even though we seldom need it, when we do, they are always quick to get us through the issue.
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.
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
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 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 selected CenterPoint Payroll because of our dissatisfaction with ADP (and Paychex prior). We wanted a solution that we controlled internally, instead of having to be at the mercy of some huge company that saw us as a tiny fish in a big ocean. We set our company's configuration, add/define all of our own specific settings, profiles, etc. and simply process payroll. We print and sign our own checks, process our own direct deposits directly with our bank, and can handle our own business needs. When we were with ADP and Paychex before, both companies made promises to us that they simply were either unwilling or unable to fulfill. We have saved both time and money by doing our payrolls ourselves with CenterPoint.
Unfortunately, I do not recall the brands of the other human capital management software programs or tools I used at my current company or workplaces prior. I do think that is a testament to Workday with its strong branding and compelling features. I was not part of the selection process of Workday but have enjoyed my experience.
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
CenterPoint Payroll has saved us tens of thousands of dollars from our prior arrangement with ADP, while providing either similar or superior support.
Having payroll completely in our control has simplified a LOT of our daily routines - if something needs to be updated or adjusted, we do it ourselves instead of contacting someone at ADP and hoping that they can do it for us, then getting frustrated when they haven't.
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.
