Workday Human Capital Management is built as a cloud-based system with global consistency in user experience. Workday HCM is part of a broader system with other Workday products.
$100
per year per user
Zuora
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Zuora is one of the best-known subscription billing platforms. Zuora is an enterprise-level product and, as such, provides comprehensive metrics, tax automation, and support for multiple currencies. It also offers Salesforce and NetSuite integration out-of the-box. It often replaces cumbersome ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems that does not focus exclusively on billing.
Workday human capital management is well suited for organizations to manage their employee records. It is also well suited for managing the employee's salary details, also the details of past salary changes, promotions, etc. It has options to keep track of employees' goals for the year, where they can keep track of their progress, and also managers can view the progress or share feedback. This is very helpful for tracking career progress and providing feedback. Other options, like training assigned to employees, can also be seen in Workday; users will get alerts by email for any new assignments or due assignments, etc.
Zuroa is very well-suited for B2B businesses that primarily have a subscription stream of revenue. It is less appropriate for B2C and retail, if you are only selling one-time products or services, this tool would be overkill and confusing instead of helpful. However, if you need to recognize revenue from subscriptions over the service period, Zuora is a lifesaver.
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.
The implementation of Zuora is very helpful. Their interactive training guides are one of the best I've used. It is very thorough and any salesperson can learn how to use it very quickly.
Their subscription management offers many ways to sell a subscription. These subscriptions can be evergreen (renewing every month) or termed subscriptions. The subscriptions can be amended to add/remove products very easily.
The ability to quickly pass through large amounts of usage data for our clients is allowing us to perform billing in a time-effective manner. Once usage data is loaded, a few clicks and all of the invoices for our client base can be generated. Invoices are clean and detailed which help us maintain a good customer experience even with our somewhat complex billing model. The reporting is extremely helpful in calculating the end of month commissions, recognizing and deferring revenue, and overall bookkeeping.
User Interface - Zuora's UI is still a weak point, however, this is negated through the use of its API's. Zuora has done a lot of work in releasing new products to limit its UI experience and the addition of Orders allows for more functionality to reduce the UI issue.
Complex system - This is both a pro and a con, but in this instance, it is a con because we may not have taken the time to truly understand the implications of all the options that were available. the Flexibility is great however if you do not take the time to understand the product and what problem you are trying to solve, you can make life difficult for yourself later down the track. Take the time to map out your approach end to end and ensure your assumptions at the start are robust.
Reporting - reporting is weak as such we have moved away to our own reporting data warehouse.
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
Our business is now, more than ever, focused on our core business rather than homegrown support tools for quoting, contracts, billing, invoicing, payments and the rest of the subscription economy. We evaluated other solutions and found this the best and most viable solution given the strong ties to Salesforce and it's integration. Zuora works, and it works well.
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
I had 20+ years of accounting experience before taking on the revenue role. I had several things to [learn] but was able to easily master the software in a matter of weeks. Zuora is our preferred billing platform that we currently use - very efficient and much more automated than our other platform/process.
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.
There have only been a few days/instances in the past 2.5 years of using zuora that I, personally have had issues or been notified of issues relating to Zuora.
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
Zuora does a superb job for all the tasks I use it for. Billing - it is trustworthy and accurate. Customer data- it holds it and keeps past records for even cancelled accounts, and subscription builds - it has the ability to make very difficult subscriptions seem easy.
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.
A support request is emailed to their support team, then an automated response is sent to you in a couple hours saying "Hey, someone will take a look at your support request soon". Then somewhere around 12-18 hours later, an actual support member responds with "Have you checked out our tutorials? Here's one that sounds like it might help you". I don't want a tutorial given to me that I've already read through that only exists because of the terrible user design of Zuora's user interface
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.
I think Zuora did a great job. However, they could have provided more guidance on how to deal with out Payment Gateway and Processor provider, as well as guidance around providing a Mobile Responsive experience for sites using the Zuora HPM.
Unfortunately, I do not recall the brands of the other human capital management software programs or tools I used at my current company or workplaces prior. I do think that is a testament to Workday with its strong branding and compelling features. I was not part of the selection process of Workday but have enjoyed my experience.
In its focused area of subscription management, Zuora does well against competitors. There are some aspects of the tool that appear to attempt to be more "platform" oriented, but fall off quickly. NetSuite and SFDC are not reporting tools, but they look great when compared to Zuora in this regard. Zuora has scripting capabilities thru REST and SOAP (deprecated), but I have found it to be confusing and not particularly useful; much of the documentation and KB seems out-of-date or just plain wrong.
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 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.
