Workday HCM vs WorkForce Suite

Workday Human Capital Management is well suited for day-to-day human resources tasks as well a future planning regarding goals, quarterly check-ins, and career growths. It is useful to have multiple features and available tasks in the overall dashboard. It is helpful that learning paths and courses are also integrated in the platform.

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.

• 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.

• 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

• The web interface is awful
• Terrible, terrible, UI. No modern features like auto-save. I can't count the times I have lost work.
• Their UX team (if it even exists) must be aliens, because I can't see how humans would have come up with the UI conventions they have.
• Who creates a website application where you can't open stuff in multiple browser windows and tabs easily?

• One feature I would like to see on EmpCenter is a vacation calendar that monitors all vacation requests for all employees within a group.
• EmpCenter is not wholly compatible with other softwares and there are occasions when time data does not properly translate.
• Moreover, I would like EmpCenter to automatically provide timekeepers with delegations from managers. This way if a manger does not want to grant the timekeeper authority it is easier to rescind, rather than tracking down all managers to grant timekeeping privileges.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Extremely knowledgeable staff that truly care about our business processes

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

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

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.

Its core strengths met our functional, technical and implementation requirements, getting in early saved us money without putting it off and waiting until we HAD to select and implement. SAP doesn't stack up well and we wanted a US system. The cloud and its excellent functionality benefits for the Human Resources and Payroll departments was clear, and the users appreciate its generally good user interfaces and ease of movement within the system.

Deputy was a LOT easier to use, and I personally liked it more. It did not make approving payroll at the end of the week as easy as WorkForce, and Deputy did not show any PTO balances. Deputy seemed like a simpler, less in-depth version of WorkForce. Personally, I would prefer Deputy, but a lot of my colleagues disagree

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

• Gave us almost 4 hours per HR rep back on new hire day 1. We have a start date every 4 weeks and the manual entry of paperwork that was able to be eliminated with Workday has allowed us to put more HR reps in the classroom to aid with more important day 1 tasks.
• Simplified search - the backend information is now housed in a simple database that allows me to pull with employee first or last name, or user ID.
• We paid more for this solution, but we've seen a 33% increase in employee interaction since doing so.

• 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.