Cornerstone Galaxy vs. SAP SuccessFactors HCM

Cornerstone Galaxy is a good solution for larger companies that focus on training and want to offer a variety of options to their employees and departments. It is highly customizable. It does require a tech savvy team to set-up, and maintain. This is not a set-it-and-forget-it system. From an LMS perspective, it wouldn't be my top choice for employees who only need a mobile-friendly approach.

It is a strong system that pays off once it's fully tailored to your organization. If your company has well-defined HR processes, SuccessFactors will likely integrate seamlessly. We've automated processes that previously required departments to spend weeks on back-and-forth emails. We've partnered with Capgemini to fully suck out the most out of its technical customization.

Incentivized

• Ability to provide multiple customizable access roles from general end user to full system admin and anything in between
• Powerful reporting system in the LMS to track a plethora of data points within the platform (user data, training information, transcript information)
• Great options to customize the look and feel of your "home page" to best meet your company's needs and goals.
• Ability to customize the transcript view for learners (i.e. when Completed training will move to their Archived transcript, what to do with Inactive training on transcripts)

Incentivized

• The product is straightforward to use. The product allows instant edits if a mistake is made and is very helpful in keeping track of individual employee working hours.
• Use of the platform ensures that your business is connected to a global workforce experience powered by modern HR technologies and AI.
• Implementation of the software ensures an excellent workforce experience and accelerates overall business performance.

Incentivized

• Sometimes finding the right answer to your support question can be a bit more difficult than it should be.
• I would like to see more OSHA related courses.
• At times, the administrative interface seems to need to be updated, but the tradeoff honestly might be the absolute rock-solid stability of the platform.

Incentivized

• I think just overall the configuration can be a little bit hard on the backend user, like myself, knowing which screens to go to. Better documentation on how we configure things would be a great resource for employees in the HR field that are making those backend changes.

Incentivized

As long as pricing stays reasonable, we will likely stay with Cornerstone for at least one more contract renewal. It would be a large task to migrate all of our content to a new system. However, the LMS landscape is diversifying with new startups that are showing some real innovation.

Incentivized

It is the product that the Business is fully committed to for co-ordinately HR processes. Employee and Manage Self-Service has allow our business to reduce the overheads in our HR operating mode. The integration with 3rd party products is now in place and further developments will only increase its importance. SuccessFactors provide regular enhancements and has a support model in line with our business requirements.

Incentivized

Easy to use, easy to learn, lots of support during the learning process. There are a few parts of the system we don't use and I'm hesitant to begin using because other clients have said they're difficult and cumbersome (certifications) or outdated (libraries)

Generally works as it needs to but there is room for improvement. Notifications are an example where they come from different places whereas they should be centralised and standardised. We would love to have time management and award interpretation in SAP SuccessFactors HCM instead of a third party system however the lack of rostering functionality makes this unusable

Incentivized

I haven't really had any major availability problems. The service is practically impeccable but it is true that at times, due to server and latency problems, the application has been slower. But these have been specific issues that have resolved themselves.

Until now we have not had serious availability problems with SuccessFactors, we had Microsoft Active Directory and SSO with ADFS and we had availability problems but because of problems with ADFS, we migrated to Azure AD and with that the availability problems of SuccessFactors because of ADFS went away. The only windows of unavailability that we have had are those that we are communicated to do maintenance and upgrades.

Incentivized

I haven't seen many issues at all with load times. Sometimes learning assignments will take longer then expected but it is still reasonable. They have taken great effort over the last couple years to speed things up like reports and search results so I expect that effort to continue in the coming year.

Incentivized

The performance is very good, the truth is that we have not had serious performance problems, some complex reports may take a little longer, but considering the complexity and the amount of records it is an acceptable time. We have never received a complaint from users regarding page loading speed.

Incentivized

Its always important to have support when you are facing problems and when you are the main admin of the organization. Cornerstone Support is very supporting when you have not found the answer in the help guide. its very useful to have a team support to guide you.

Incentivized

SAP SuccessFactors has been a easy to implement tool with low risks for a sensitive thing like employee feedback. It provides powerful performance in the backend functionalities, and at the same time a great look and feel for the employees. Totally recommended.

Incentivized

we use also to admin all our training in person events and sessions. Its easy to admin this kind of trainings and automatize some processes we have. Also de user experience and the integration with other systems helps to the employees to use more. All modules integrated oriented to develop people is the principal reason to have CSOD. The training administration is very complete and allows to automate many processes.

The in-person training was with a consultancy, we have taken several courses, all very specific. They have been reports in ecp, general configuration of ec, reports and IAS

Incentivized

The online modules are pretty good. You can access them at any time, which we have done. You learn a lot in the beginning, but having the ability to retake short lessons when you are working on those items was very helpful.

Incentivized

We use SAP Learning, and we like it very much, the topics are updated along with the products, we have access to the SFX customer certifications and we have done them all, in general the SAP learning platform is very good and complete.

Incentivized

The implementation was pretty difficult. We felt they (Cornerstone) didn’t properly allocate the resources to complete our implementation in the timetable we wanted.

For example, we worked on Workday and SSO integrations - work that we had specifically contracted for in advance. When we were ready to work on that project, they didn’t have the people ready to help us, so it took a lot longer than necessary. That was my biggest pain point.

The implementation approach we went with was a self-led implementation. We would speak to the implementation manager once per week, and self-trained. We met with implementation manager to discuss issues, review things that we’d learned for 1 hour. We found that wasn’t enough. Other things would come up outside that one hour window that we couldn’t get answers to. We didn’t have anyone to ask about those things and we had to wait to ask during our weekly meeting.

The advantage of the self-led implementation approach was that it was really inexpensive – significantly less than the implementation cost for the other systems that we looked at. I also liked that we could pace ourselves. There were however big roadblocks. We would have to make sure the right resources were available. We had an implementation/project manager with a lot of experience and felt that the person was knowledgeable but missed on a few things.

In hindsight, I would still go with the self-led implementation, but knowing what I know now, I would ask for the integration person to be available more. I would work that into the contract. With single sign-on, we needed deep linking to build direct links through a Single Sign-On tool, e.g. when someone gets an email, it directs them to training. But it has to go through SSO to get them to the correct link. Deep linking wasn’t turned on in our system and they had to activate it. We encountered little things like that – sequencing pre-requisites which were problematic. We tried to troubleshoot ourselves.

I recommend you consider contracting for some extra implementation hours and determine when they are going to be available. Work it into the contract that you have the ability to call tech support during implementation. In addition to weekly implementation meetings, they have technical webexes – 4 every week, but 2 didn’t apply to us – one as we were using SSO. The challenge is they were not always relevant – we had specific questions that didn’t fall into those categories

As we were new with all this, we would greatly appreciate if we had assitance directly from SAP so we can implement the modules with all of its features and best practices. Unfortunately, we notice that the partner left some thing incomplete.

Incentivized

The user experience is a lot better than using SumTotal as an admin CSOD makes working easy. Without having workarounds. Reporting is a lot better than both platforms. Reporting in CSOD is complex however easy to manage and create when you understand the data points collected

Incentivized

SAP SuccessFactors is a very user-friendly application, it stacks up very well against competition, such as Oracle PeopleSoft HCM. We selected SAP SuccessFactors because we are already using a lot of other SAP solutions, such as SAP S/4 HANA and SAP Business Technology Platform. It allows us to have single-sign on and one vendor with multiple solutions.

Incentivized

It is important to be familiar with the terms and annual increases in licenses and other aspects of the contract. I recommend analyzing this from the beginning and the permanence is relevant because Cornerstone updates its modules and brings out new features that may allow you to leave a module to acquire another

Not applicable.

Incentivized

It's a great product with some pieces that are set but many things that can be customized as needed for individual needs

Incentivized

The scalability and flexibility of SuccessFactors is unbeatable. It is very easy to scale the product to new countries and areas, and with the help of CPI it can be easily integrated.

Incentivized

As I have said before, I have no doubt that the services of the Cornerstone sales people were very good. In particular, our salesperson spent a lot of time in contact with us to make the process go smoothly. Perhaps being a large company in some cases the times were slowed down but it is something normal to take into account.

Once time we need to change the datacenter and we made this with the professional services from SAP... everything goes just fine. excelent service.

Incentivized

• We are in the process of trying to increase employee engagement through content expansion. We are in the early stages of this.
• The Edge Import Tool, in conjunction with Reporting 2.0, has done a great job of helping to automate/semi-automate tasks for huge time savings.
• Maintaining compliance. Achieved through dynamic/automated groups, assignments, communication, and reporting.

Incentivized

• It helps better in the tedious task of job posting, it's automated to social handles.
• Better performance in speed, UI, performance management, skill management, talent onboarding, and finding candidates in the talent pool.
• Reduces most of the cost in HR operations and future-proof technology with continuous improvement.

Incentivized