Forecast vs. Workday Professional Services Automation

Forecast is well suited to track resources throughout a project or account lifecycle. The biggest benefit Forecast offers is the ease of scheduling resources across upcoming projects. This allows managers to confirm that projects are fully staffed or see which resources are over-allocated. This often will lead to department heads to analyze teams and determine whether more resources are required to be hired.

Incentivized

Workday Professional Services Automation is a great product for large companies that have standardized, repetitive processes. The ability to automate tactical HR tasks is essential for business productivity, and Workday Professional Services Automation delivers well in this area. However, when a non-standardized process occurs, it is difficult to modify the system in a way that doesn't create confusion for the end-user, resulting in a less than desirable HR experience. For example, when my small company was acquired, our parent business utilized the software for transferring employees from the acquired business to the parent business to ensure they could sign up for health benefits, payroll, etc on Day 1; but, because every form is interrelated, the in-house Workday team was either unable or unwilling to change their workday "standard" fields for offer letters. As VP of HR for the acquired team, I had to meet one-off with each acquired employee to reassure them that certain clauses in the standard offer letter would not apply, explain why their personal email addresses were being used instead of their business ones, and assure them that they were being fully vested/transferred employees and were not considered "new employees" like the offer letter stated, etc.

Incentivized

• Assign and allocate resources.
• Identify lean departments and identify areas to increase headcount.
• Manage agile teams.
• Identify bottlenecks in departments or resourcing.

Incentivized

• Very fast authentication
• Page uploads are reliably compete with pre filled and carried forward data elements.
• Easy to employees to navigate from one app to the other so they can be efficient in achieving success an ls completing imp tasks.
• Screen organization and menu choices flow intuitively and the processing behind the scenes follows the logic users expect.

• Not as intuitive as its companion software, Harvest. This software takes longer to learn when on-boarding new staff. It is also difficult to view time notes without needing to physically open them up. This could be improved by expanding the "on hover" functionality. Personally, having spent as little time in workflow software is really important, as it gives me more time to code.
• Because we use this software to plan schedules, items often fall through the cracks. I would like to see some more sophisticated syncing with not only Harvest but also with Asana.
• Lack of integration with Asana. It would be nice to pull data from forecast and display it in Asana. This would be helpful for understanding how much time I have to spend on a project rather than bounce back and forth between web apps.

Incentivized

• Would like to be able to use it for clocking in and out
• The dashboard user interface could be improved to include more pertinent information
• Would be nice to hide features that we use other applications for (i.e. org chart, pay, expenses)

Incentivized

As noted, good tools that allow faster development. Dev teams find it is easy to test things out and demo for business users

I have not needed support for Forecast.

Incentivized

With workday support options, I would like to see a more immediately responsive response option. Possibly a chat or a responsive email response team would be helpful.

Incentivized

I have not used any other scheduling software other than Forecast. The company selected Forecast because it is used in conjunction with Harvest. The pair of web apps can be used to pull detailed data. This is very important to our agency, and making data-driven decisions is exceptionally important to our agency mission.

Incentivized

Workday Professional Services Automation is a happy medium between the other competitors. It is just enough to help you run your business, but simple to use that even smaller businesses can take advantage without a huge and taxing price tag. Its expandable and has been very well received at the companies I've worked at that use it.

Incentivized

• Forecast does not integrate with other software in our workflow, and it makes it an entire extra step when it doesn't necessarily need to be. This takes extra time away from my actual job.
• Forecast is powerful when used with Harvest, and allows for powerful data-driven decisions in hiring and project estimates. The more informed we are when making decisions and scoping, the more profitable the company can be.
• It takes some time to onboard new Employees which can take time away from a profitability or other training.

Incentivized

• While I don't use the program at a high-level I can see the time-saving effectiveness for administrators.
• By giving a self-serve interface I feel in control of my pay/benefit management.
• Less time spent on HR administration frees up bandwidth for helping colleagues.

Incentivized