Likelihood to Recommend I believe it is well suited for a small sized company, like my previous one, that does not want any IT overhead to onboard a new tool. This tool is available online and can be accessed via the internet. It has all the necessary components to help you record your activity. But the solution in its current form is not scalable. [I've] Given few of my reasons I feel this is not well suited for a large company (like the one I currently work at).
Read full review EmpCenter is really well suited for companies with minimal variety in time keeping needs. Certainly somewhere that has fairly regular work schedules and operational needs the system would be programmed for and meet those needs quite well. I think they assert themselves as a product specifically for those more complex companies, and I believe it is one of a few products available for companies with many employee types and complex work schedule and pay needs, but because of those complexities each have their own specific customizations I feel it is difficult for the company to then manage the different products that end up existing. Each ends up being unique so applying large scale changes doesn't work well as something we may request and need if applied over EmpCenter in general may cause problems for another company. Therefore everything has to be done on an individual basis and is more time consuming and costly.
Traci Yates Auxiliaries and Activities Business Center Payroll Coordinator
Read full review Pros It allowed me to fill my work time sheet. Every week I had to fill this. Based on the numbers the company keeps track of which days I worked. It reminded me to fill the time sheets constantly and also notifies me when it gets approved. So I never really forgot to fill it. It allowed me to see my vacation days left, and plan ahead. It had a list of holiday dates which was very handy to plan my trips or vacation. It had categorization by department and my view of time sheets was only limited to me. I could not see others time sheets, and except for my manager, nobody else could look into mine. It had internet access, which meant I could fill my sheets anywhere. It came in handy while working from home where a VPN connection may not be present. I also guess that this service being online meant no extra effort from IT department side. Read full review A lot flexibility in configuration of the system works well with other systems. We were able to collect data from another time system, Avaya phone systems and even a point of sale system with not a lot of difficulty. They know their product and integration points. They were able to troubleshoot problems with hardware time collection devices quite quickly. We found the devices they sold to be quite durable. Out of the box they have more reports than I would have anticipated. Creating new reports was sometimes a task if it was complex but there were usually similar reports you could use as a starter template Read full review Cons The UI in my opinion was too simple. Calendar views were pretty stale. I don't believe there was a mobile app for this, or this site worked nicely when opened on small devices. A better view of my time could have been shown. At the time I could only see small excel like boxes filled with numbers. Graphs, or some other visualization of remaining days would have been lucrative. Very stupid login page. We had to fill "company name" at the login page and this name had to match exactly to what was set in the database. It was frustrating and I always had to refer my notes to get that right. There wasn't any preselection option which made it hard to do it fast. If I can only set a few fields (because we had long list of dropdowns to choose from) then this process could be much smoother. A major issue was not being able to see my team-mates schedule or calendar. E.g. when are they taking vacations. So I had to pester them offline to get this information. Many times due to inter-team miscommunication we didn't know about others vacation days during planning. A central place where I could see this information would have helped me a lot. Read full review Difficult to use Retroactive adjustments must be made by an administrator Delegation of duties must be done by an adminstrator Data must be exported and then imported into pay system, does not support interface Product has not changed or been updated in 4+ years Read full review Likelihood to Renew After spending close to 5 years to decide on which payroll product to acquire for our University, I cannot image we would switch now that we have it in use.
Read full review Support Rating Extremely knowledgeable staff that truly care about our business processes
Read full review Alternatives Considered I believe it is not in my power to select the best tool. It depends on whatever company I work for. It just happens that we use a different system (and I don't even know if this is an internal system, or another online tool). But I do like my current system. It has a better UI, and more detailed insights about my time. It also shows my pay stubs and other small neat information like tax papers to help me organize. It also has notifications when something new comes up. All these features I think I lacked in Replicon (or maybe my company didn't have access to these).
Read full review EmpCenter is a new software to the company however, I only trained on the old software for a few months before EmpCenter was introduced. I think EmpCenter has a smoother data entry process and can run more in depth reports, but since this is the system I know best I cannot accurately compare it to previous software.
Read full review Return on Investment Replicon helped me maintain a record of my time. This helped during my assessment where my manager could see my work hours. Replicon was easy to use, so I didn't spend my precious time filling sheets in this site. As far as I can remember, this site only gave me problem once, but was never down. Though a good tool, I actually never got the use case of recording your time sheets. I think it will be pretty hard for an employee to just fill the time sheet and not show up for work. There are so many meetings and people around you, that you cannot fake your presence. So I feel there is no need to fill time sheets. It is a functionality with no real world solution. Read full review EmpCenter has reduced the amount of time administrators are spending on payroll. Certainly it has made our entry to our pay system more efficient since we can simply load the data from the time keeping system and we are not collecting actual physical signatures and paper timesheets that must be reviewed for accuracy and completeness. The system does this for us and some automatic calculating of certain pay due that we were hand adding. However the feedback I am getting is that the supervisors feel their work has been increased greatly. They are spending more time correcting and approving time. Essentially the work we were doing in our central offices to review and correct time the supervisor must now do as they approve the time. We have now asked them to be more responsible for proper reporting and use which requires they know more about the rules and many different aspects of pay than they had before. We have employees who are union represented and get some benefits from the contract others do not receive, contract employees who have certain pay aspects in their contracts that must be known, as well as temporary employees and students who get very different pay from the other employees. While some things have been programmed for the system to know and handle, some things must be added to the time sheet to pay properly or the way time is reported is different (some clock out for lunch some don't) supervisors must now know these differences while that used to be a role that was more mine as an administrator. Now I just help them and audit and review. Traci Yates Auxiliaries and Activities Business Center Payroll Coordinator
Read full review ScreenShots WorkForce Suite Screenshots