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UI is great, but system management very difficult.
November 26, 2012

UI is great, but system management very difficult.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

v17

Modules Used

  • Human Capital Management (HCM)

Overall Satisfaction

  • The application interface is great. It is very user friendly from a user perspective.
  • It presents organization charts in a very user friendly, dynamic way. It’s nice to have something that’s always up to date. Of course it’s dependent on business processes flowing data into HR for updating.
  • System management is incredibly difficult. The software is based upon Business Objects which is well organized and quick, but not something I or I believe most people are familiar with. It is not your typical relational database. You cannot see data in the background and need to know where to go to find it. It is hence difficult to create reports and to enact integrations to other systems. It presents a lot of challenges.
  • It is very expensive, and we typically have to pay outside consultants to do build outs. We typically contract with our support provider - OneSource VHR, based in Dallas. They are a Workday reseller and we bought Workday through them. Companies of a smaller size cannot buy direct from Workday.
  • Security administration is relatively difficult. Sometimes things are locked down and you don’t know why one person cannot see something that another person can.
  • The mass import tool is impossible to use. It relies heavily on reference IDs, which makes sense, but there are 3 different types of reference ID s and usage is not clear cut.
  • It is not easy to do organizational changes.
  • The biggest benefit is being able to track the state of the company as far as people – to know how many employees we have, who is where and being able to enable employees to self-manage benefits and contact information, HSA/FSA contributions. It puts a lot more ownership in employees to manage the data.
  • We are looking to expand usage to enable managers to do workflows, e.g. transfer employees to other departments once approved by HR; to allow managers to submit spot bonuses. This all removes administration tasks from HR.
  • We would be closer to where we want to be, if we had better understanding of the system, and more time.
We have made such a huge investment. Knowing what I know now, I would rate the probability of me choosing the same system today 5/10, now knowing the expense and the amount of time required. I would warn my stakeholders more about that. We don’t have the people we need (amount wise). We hired someone, but then lost someone.

We met with another Workday user who has a huge team – 15 people dedicated to Workday. They also worked directly with Workday vs. a reseller. Their experience was much better. They have also had the system for long time, which means they are more used to it.
There is a really good Workday community of users. A lot of the time when you are looking for information, it is a good resource. You can submit feature requests that get voted upon.

There’s an integration how-to, for the integration I wanted to do for the LMS.

There are out of the box integration templates. One specifically for Cornerstone, Success Factors/Plateau, Wageworks. They are still not easy to configure, but a bulk of the work is done.

Product Usage

1000 - The whole company
2 - IT Program Manager 50%, 2 people in HR – HR manager and Workday admin.
  • HCM (Human Capital Management) – supports new hires, terminations, basic employee information tracking, payroll, time off, time sheets, benefits, recruiting, performance evaluations.
  • We use a separate tool - iCIMS for recruiting. Workday is not a recruiting tool and cannot track all applicants. You only put in short list. We would like to integrate iCIMS with Workday, but have not yet.
  • We are looking at adding the new time-sheet module and are interested in using it. Currently we use out of box functionality, not the enhanced version.

Evaluation and Selection

We were using a combination of ADP tools like Pay Express
Staying with ADP, Ultipro. The selection was done prior to my joining.

Implementation

I would rate OneSource VHR a 5. They do well with benefits and payroll, but poorly with customizations, integrations, and reports. I will not renew with OneSource VHR, and would not use them again or recommend them. The project team was bad. I would give them a 2/10 or 3/10. It was a terrible experience. They were knowledgeable but didn’t lead us through the implementation. We had a lot of surprises. We found out that we were submitting employee data in August but going live in January and we are adding a few hundred people in a few months, so we would have to do a big chunk of data entry, and to adjust for all the organization changes.

Workday only work directly with certain size companies. One other company I talked to works with them directly and raves about Workday’s support. I have not IDd a better channel partner to work with yet.

My key advice is to know the timeline i.e. when data is going to be uploaded, the time from that to getting your tenant back and understand how your payroll parallel testing will work .
  • Professional services company
OneSource VHR

Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
I cannot score as I have not attended. we sent our HR admin for on-site HCM training and 2 people for benefits admin training (build open enrollment etc.). Training on-site is $1800 for a course.
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.

Configuration

There are some things we do, like time-off without a vacation program (we don’t accrue). For timesheets – we don’t have approvals, just for tracking.

Support

Benefits and payroll support is really good. Integrations and report writing is not good – there are not enough people working on those things.

Usability

I would rate the user UI 8-9.

Reliability

We had one downtime event only on their sandbox – but it coincided with time that were doing training, so was a problem. We were down for a day.
We have had no issues. The system is responsive and there is nothing that times out.

Integration

  • NetSuite
  • Benefits providers - BCBS, IMED, Cygna
  • Active Directory
  • Learning Management System
  • Octa (Single Sign-On tool)
NetSuite – really just an export. A payroll file is generated from Workday and imported into the general ledger.

LMS – there is a direct link to send employee information like hire date, organization position etc. Data does not flow back to Workday. There is an import tool, but it is not part of our plan to use it.

Vendor Relationship

All our negotiations were with OneSource. Implementation cost started out at $300k – we took a lot of things out, but then also negotiated. We also had them roll in some training.

When we did the change order to have them load our tenant with more current data – they priced it at $75k and we pushed back to $1500 but the scope of work was vastly different.

We signed a contract in August and were supposed to pay in September for subscription fees, but our finance department pushed back and we were able to defer payment until November in line with when we were going to test software – look out for subscription start date.