Darwin CX vs. UKG Ready

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.

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

• Custom reporting is not intuitive
• 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

• 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