Item: PDS Vista
Rating: 9
Author: Jim McKain SPHR

Overall Satisfaction with Vista HRMS

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Vista for all HR and PR processing and record keeping. We have about 50 managers with access to see employee information but most of the managers have read only access. Hope to enhance the use of the system in the coming years. Right now we have a few users in the accounting PR department and a few users in the HR department which I manage.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Good at record retention and ease of historical data for recall and report writing. We use the entire employee benefits processing function and it works very well.
Good flexibility for payroll processing and special pay runs and bonus calculations.

Cons

It's pretty stressful to get hit with multiple releases at the end of the calendar year when we are already stressed about getting our year end processes completed. One suggestion might be to rank the error warnings in some way that gives them a severity rating, or maybe something that tells you this is a recurring warning that you might have already reviewed at the last release, and this time around you can ignore it again rather than investigate it.
Employee self-service is easy to use. We have challenges getting security to work properly for people who don't use the system on a regular basis. We are going to try giving our employees cards to write their log on and password on it.

Return on Investment

Unfortunately, we do not measure, but I am sure it would be favorable if we did.

Alternatives Considered

ADP and Paychex

The other two I have used in the past were a pay as you go type of a thing where you had to request and pay for every report that you wanted, I like the on demand and licensing concept better.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it is well suited for most any HR or PR application. The trick is to get the right orientation and training up front and then after implementation. We failed to set up several things properly and we are still playing catch up but that is most likely our own fault. Making sure companies have a realistic understanding of the resource commitment is critical. A comprehensive HRIS package is every bit as complicated as most MRP packages, but most IT managers and C-Suite executives will not agree that the resources dedicated to the success of the HRIS package may rival that of a good MRP package.

PDS Vista Feature Ratings

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

PDS Vista's strong points