Big disappointment. Has actually increased costs.

We are 18 months into a two year contract and I have already tried to exit (unsuccessfully).

They are really involved in SHRM (Society of Human Resource Managers) and won best place to work. They showcase themselves at SHRM as darlings of high engagement. Employee interactions/ care were so different to their image. People were nice but incompetent.

In hindsight, I should have done the following in our evaluation:

1) Have them show us how a specific feature works - not just ask if it does it. A prime example is notification that a manager has an action to do, there’s no link in email to Ultipro, we just assumed it was there.

2) Access more back-channel references. We asked as many back channel references as we could find, though our processes were probably a little more sophisticated than theirs.

3) Ask about partner ecosystem.

The implementation approach was challenging. Ultipro implements just one module at a time. You have a different person implementing each module and they don’t talk to each other. Our admin had to start over with each person. There was no master person or file

The account managers were all but useless. We must have gone through 4-5 people. We ended up saying we cannot work with this person anymore. I began to escalate and fire account managers. We finally got one person who listened and said that they would help. They said that we’ll have a plan by X date ,but then they went on vacation. She ended up being a no-op. Even when pressed, she would never give her boss’s name. Eventually, I just stopped trying.

I recommend that you put money in your budget for a consultant and hire someone to help with day to day. A consultant cannot necessarily do business process stuff, but it would have been useful to have someone experienced with Ultipro who could help get around issues. Been there done that experience is really important.

I couldn’t escalate. We kept getting false promises.

It’s ok. There were things we liked about it. The issue is less ability usability and more about poor mapping to business processes. We are not that unusual as a business. They did serve other software companies.