From Ascentis, NOVAtime was a set of workforce management solutions providing timekeeping, payroll, leave management, and employee scheduling needs. Ascentis was acquired by UKG in March of 2022, and along with NOVAtime, will be discontinued.
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PRO Unlimited Wand VMS
Score 9.0 out of 10
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PRO Unlimited headquarted in Boca Raton, Florida offers the Wand Vendor Management System (VMS), a workforce management system for a contingent workforce.
We continue to remain the only professional baseball team that utilizes NOVAtime for our scheduling of staff, mostly because it was designed to schedule hospital workers. The lag time when updating the ASM is extremely time consuming and the inability to work in multiple internet tabs or windows makes it that much more inefficient. I am sure it is a fantastic system for other organizations but it continues to be a challenge for us.
When working with a VMS or MSP I must say PRO is one of the best to use. You are able to manage multiple clients within the same portal, very user-friendly, able to go to one location for all recruitment needs, management needs, sales and accounting needs. It helps organize recruitment needs and make sure that candidates are within budget. With this program, I do not have to worry about aging reports or outstanding invoices
As compared to other VMSs out there, Wand does allow for more information to be entered. In particular, I don't like when there are little to no free-form fields in a VMS, as you cannot truly explain a candidate's experiences without free-form entry.
Notifications actually explain what is happening. Some VMSs send notifications that require you to login to see the activity. It's nice to see the info come directly to me in an email.
There does need to be more support and knowledge when it comes to alternate workweek schedule types (9/80, etc.), as there have been a few unique challenges with those.
The overall satisfaction within the organization has been luke warm, at best. The software may be more conducive for a hospital but I believe there is a reason why we are the lone baseball team utilizing it.
On the employee's side of things, Novatime is pretty intuitive and fairly easy to use. All they have to do is either press a button to punch in or punch out. If they are entering in their hours, all they have to do is type in the number of hours per day. On the manager's side of things, Novatime is also fairly easy to use. It highlights in red any missed punches and in green any OT that the employee has. There are links on the homepage of the manager's page that will lead them to a list of all their employees' missed punches for a pay period and they can fix them all before payroll is due. Novatime becomes a bit more complicated on the administrator's side. The issues I have run into with Novatime normally come after updates/upgrades to their system. They have been getting better, but the administrator's side is still a bit clunky and takes a while to find what you are looking for. It is not as intuitive as the other sides and takes a bit of computer knowledge to figure it out.
The program itself can be customized in many different ways to meet the needs of the company/organization that it is working with. The charts/graphs on the new homepage are somewhat helpful and link to useful information. It has some really nice scheduling features that allow managers to see the difference between hours expected to work and actual hours worked as well as overtime, absences, and non-scheduled shifts. Processing payroll is quite simple. PTO request off is straightforward.
Again, I didn't specifically select the Wand system; our client selected it, and I work with it. However, I have used several VMSs as well, so I feel as though I can compare from a user perspective. Wand isn't great - I prefer Fieldglass for sure, mostly for it's simplicity. IQNavigator, Beeline, and PeopleFluent are all similar to Wand in that they tend to be over-complicated, with a lot of steps involved in the submittal process that aren't relevant to the hiring process. And none are all that intuitive. However, in my experience, the people at PRO are top-notch, and more helpful than almost any others from other VMSs with whom I have worked. I'm not sure if that is strictly a function of the client environment, or PRO itself, but it's worth remarking on.
Only negative is that there is not a real connection with the managers from a Recruitment or Sales point of view - but understand they are prob bombarded by sales calls
Very helpful tool to keep process and procedures in place
