Frontline is well suited for an organization such as a school district where teachers sometimes need to put in for a substitute at the last minute or especially early in the morning. The system also helps with substitutes in picking up the jobs when a teacher puts in an absence.
syncHR is designed for mid to large size companies, typically 200-2000 employees. Any organization that has a strong reporting need and/or a complicated payroll process could benefit from the unique features built into the platform
Automated retroactive change processing and mid-period rate changes – completely automated with no manual intervention needed - If you ever need to give someone a merit increase and make it retroactive or if an employee is entitled to enroll in health benefits on their first day employment but has 30 days to enroll, syncHR will automatically handles these retro changes.
A single application designed from the ground up that gives equal weight to HR, payroll, and benefit functions - syncHR is designed as a true unified solution with no back-end mainframes or separate front-ends vs backends. Everything is processed real-time in the cloud which has eliminated all discrepancies.
Customer Service - syncHR provides a designated account manager as your single point of contact. Since the The StaffWell Group is a 24/7 business, I needed a company that was available when I needed them. syncHR delivered with 24/7 emergency support.
Event-driven employee self service - Other systems we have used rely on employees to make the correct choices as to what is required when completing an employee initiated transaction. With syncHR, the system always directs the employee to the next step reducing both errors and calls to our support staff. I believe this is also the reason why we had a 40% increase in the adoption of ESS.
Dynamic Security & Workflows - syncHR has no static pages which allows security and workflows to be updated automatically whenever a change is made. This has virtually eliminated the time and effort required from HR to manually update workflows to the correct personnel.
Teachers cannot cancel their own absence. We have to ask the office staff to do so. This is irritating when an absence must be canceled (Due to a canceled professional development, for example).
Sometimes absences go unfilled. It would be great if AESOP could have a roster of qualified substitutes to cover absences.
You cannot assign your absence to a particular substitute if you know he or she is available and a good fit for your absence.
Learning Management System- syncHR currently does not offer an LMS system. They only track and report training dates, licenses and certifications.
Although syncHR is a global solution it is somewhat limited to tracking employee headcount, HR documents, paperless on boarding and benefit information. There is no international payroll option like the one they provide for domestic employees. Although the system can handle multiple languages and currencies, I would like to see a global payroll option.
Succession Planning - syncHR provides little functionality for succession planning. The system can track budgets vs actuals, goals and ratings but does not offer a true succession planning module
Long time customer with Frontline Absence Management. Product support has been excellent, integrations easy to work with, & suite of products mesh together well.
While we have had minor issues logging in as our organization has its own login page, the site and its application are very easy to use. So long as members of a group log in through the appropriate page, navigating and using this site is quite easy. With the transition from Aesop to Frontline, the page also seems to have worked through any glitches found with the previous page and its app.
Overall the system is very easy to navigate but more importantly my employees find it so easy to use. The percentage of employees who now use ESS went up by 40%
Internal support is provided by EDU Staff based out of Grand Rapids. Whenever I have had an issue they are very responsive to my needs. For instance, there may be conflicts in the amount of money that was listed for the contract. There may be questions about the length of an assignment such as 1/2 day, full day, or early dismissal. The school will sometimes enter the wrong information. Very good IT support, but sometimes you are on hold for 5 to 10 minutes because they do not have enough workers in their Call Center
Whenever we need support our designated account manager is there to provide answers for us. If she doesn't have or know the answer, additional support is provided via a service matter expert in that field. Support hours are 24/7
Our Implementer/Trainer was a product line expert. He (Connor) walked us through every step with confidence and explained everything in detail. Frontline provided written documentation, cut-n-paste emails to staff, and a test environment for us to play in. We were able to test unique scenarios without actually sending emails, notifications, alerts to staff. This was very useful.
During the first few weeks of implementation it is important to have all key members participate in meetings. Finance, HR, Payroll and Benefits should be involved from the early stages to ensure that the solution is designed to meet your specific requirements. Since syncHR personalizes their solution for each company a few wrong steps early on regarding the design we wanted caused us to spend extra time later. The more info you provide syncHR upfront the better they can take all of your rules and needs into account from day one. In our case, finance did not get involved right away and therefore some of the items that we needed for our GL needed to be re-done. SyncHR was very accommodating though as they spent extra time with us to update some of the allocations so that finance got what they needed
Frontline seems to be the industry standard for this software in the education industry. I am not familiar with any competitors or what was evaluated prior to implementing Frontline. For it to be the industry standard, I would assume that its cost is fair in relation to competitors and that the onboarding process is simple.
As I mentioned I have used UltiPro, ADP, Ceridian as well as several others and none of them seem to offer half of the functionality and service that syncHR provides. Although we had some problems from time to time, I hold companies in high regard by how they resolve these problems. It's a comfort knowing that my HCM provider truly cares about me and my business so if for no other reason than this, I feel syncHR is far and away the best system I have used. The system works as advertised which is all I could ask for
Our district has approximately 300 substitutes & 1,800 employees. Size has never been an issue with Absence Management. There are other districts much larger using Absence Management with no problems
It's given staff direct access to inputting their absences and secure coverage quicker, whereas before they had to make a call to a person. That person had to secure coverage for the entire district at different levels. Sometimes that person was absent or unable to provide coverage.
Due to complexity of our payroll, it would typically take us almost 3 full days to verify hours and perform retro changes before actually running payroll. With so many retroactive changes and manual calculations it was a time consuming and error prone process. With syncHR, the accuracy of payroll has increased tremendously and the amount of time we now spend preparing to process payroll decreased to less than 4 hours per week. All approved time seamlessly moves from the T&A module into payroll and all retro transactions are automatically processed.
When I initially selected syncHR I was a little hesitant because I never heard of them before and was concerned about their viability as a company and customer service. Several years later I'm happy to say that syncHR has provided better support than any of the better know competitors ever did.
Although no system is ever perfect, overall syncHR has exceeded most of my expectations. The sales and implementation process was wonderful, the salesperson was responsive and did not oversell what the system could do.
Training & Implementation - syncHR spent a considerable amount of time learning my business rules in order to build the system to meet my requirements. Training was provided on all aspects of the system until my team felt comfortable enough to handle things on their own. I never felt as though we had a set number of hours of training or that our questions, no matter how redundant or simple were a bother to them.
