PDS Vista vs. Workday Human Capital Management

As Vista HRMS is fully customizable to suit your needs, a company should determine if they have a current employee who can do the work themselves otherwise they will need to consider the additional cost of asking PDS to do the customizations for them. There are additional modules that we aren't currently making use of, but each company should learn about the functionality of each of them as some may be more beneficial than others. When gathering your questions, ask all potential users of the system what they would want to see in an HRMS. We did so before selecting Vista HRMS and we got pages and pages of questions and comments and made sure that each item was addressed beforehand and was something that we would be able to incorporate into the system. You have the option of taking the system in house or being a hosted client. Make sure you figure out what resources your IT department has available. If you have a dedicated administrator who will do all the upgrades and enhancements great, otherwise you may need PDS to help out and having PDS host may be a better option

I would say it's well suited in every environment because I think it does so much. It's like the holy grail of HRIS systems is what I like to call it because thinking about all parts of the employee lifecycle, it lives here in Workday Human Capital Management. So I love the fact that you can do the people data analytics, you can store employee records, the talent acquisition pieces there. I'm thinking I can't think of anything negative right now except for the fact that I can't drill down into the data for the people analytics side. Other than that, I think it's literally, yeah, the holy grail of HRIS systems, I love it and I would highly recommend it.

Incentivized

• Vista HRMS is very flexible, it does everything we need for HR, benefits and payroll. It’s user-friendly and intuitive to use, when we roll out new self-service items our employees have no problems and require minimal training or documentation.
• PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are usually addressed within a few days. We were upgrading our production servers to Windows 2012 over a weekend and a key person in our organization was on leave. When we checked with PDS to see what cost would be involved if we needed their help, they said it was included in our regular maintenance, no extra cost.
• The PDS User’s Conference is an excellent learning opportunity for training on everything Vista does, including using Crystal Reports for custom reporting. You also get to meet and talk to the executive and development staff and have direct input into the future product development.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Typical of any system built for the unknown requirements of hundreds or thousands of customers with varying needs, PDS sometimes doesn't fit our processes precisely out of the box. However, this con is far outweighed by the ability to configure and customize the system.
• The most significant pet peeve of our users is the necessity for so many clicks to navigate between different areas or the system or to review applicants. These items are being addressed based on feedback from the user community in an upcoming release.

• Should have more option in time sheet like choose project code or something.
• On The pay page, it should have options to view past salaries; it may be there already but not in the version that I use.
• The employee information page does not have a back button to navigate to the previous page.

I feel so invested in Vista HRMS that I don't really want to try other options. I know we as an organization are not using this product to it's full potential and that is just due to us lacking the resources to be able to invest the time into breaking it apart and making it work to the best ability for us. The system works great as is, but there are a lot of implementations we can put into place to help us out even more. For example, we would love to start using Workflow to create more efficiencies. I personally have a very good relationship with our hosted vendor who supports Vista HRMS and can help me with any issues and concerns, this is a big part of the reason that I would renew with this product and continue to be an advocate for Vista HRMS.

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

Incentivized

In my line of work, PDS Vista doesn't fit. I recruit and manager talent pipelines, as well as all onboarding aspects of 11 companies. I spend more hours getting data configured and searching for information within this software than I spend with my candidates. Theres an abundance duplication, and there isn't a single stream of information shared across screens. I have to input the SAME details into several screens for them to match up. Nothing is intuitive, and its certainly not end user friendly

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the
majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we
call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are
usually addressed within a few days

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

The resources and online tools that PDS provide are extremely thorough and helpful in our training and learning.

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

Ask lots of questions, ensure you fully understand the functionality (particularly history records) and train, train, train the users for correct and complete utilization of the system.

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.

I've used Peoplesoft HCM in the past. The products have some similarities, but they are marketed to different sized companies, so it's a bit of apples to oranges. Peoplesoft was very complex and challenging to manage and support. Vista HRMS should require fewer technical resources and still provide robust features for HR and Payroll. We selected Vista HRMS because it met the majority of our requirements and was priced to enable us to purchase and implement it within our budget. Also, it's an integrated system (although not truly one system when you count Vista Time) which is an improvement over our current state.

Incentivized

Workday is an incomplete product, by this I mean it must work alongside other products and does not work by itself. Trying to make several different products work smoothly together becomes very challenging. As compared to ADP products, when purchased all together work very well all together. Also, ADP has extensive Training programs and extensive Customer Support. So ADP's products are far superior to Workday's products in my opinion.

Incentivized

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

• Positive impact would definitely be self-service for both employees and managers to view and update selected data.
• Through some analytics our managers are able to track turnover for their site/department by many criteria (length of service, reason, etc) and can view a number of other analytical reports such as headcount and demographics which help them to make informed decisions about their department.

• 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.

Incentivized