Workday Reviews

I am a consultant. I configure and consult with clients who ask me about solutions, how to use products, how to help them to implement the solutions, how to improve the deployment and performance, and how to give them the solutions they need. Workday is one of the better solutions we can provide.

Workday gives us another option for providing solutions to our clients that they need for managing and improving their business practices.

The feature I think that is the most attractive is the security. But there are other features that are valuable as well, such as the BP (Business Processes) — like the social security business processes — the HCM (Human Capital Management) modeling component, Absence (for monitoring time and attendance), Payroll (for payroll processing), Financial Management (core financial management) and the Benefits module (self service employee benefits management). All of those take care of essential business needs.

In essence, I think that all areas of the product have the potential to improve even if they are good already. At the same time, from one release to the next, Workday makes the effort to improve the product. The company has two updates per year. The product is always getting better with each release. If there was anything specific that I thought of that I would improve, it would be the Benefits domain and the advanced computations.

What clients seem to respond to as being in need of attention and want to see developed for the program is apparent in the community cooperation. Workday uses the community to brainstorm and collect feedback and drive innovation. To work with brainstorming, you go to the community and you create a brainstorm (propose an idea and enhancement), and then people in the community vote on it. You get votes and rankings based on response to your ideas. I think Workday is quite proud of the large percentage (40% or so) of what comes out in their releases comes from brainstorms and client feedback. There are tons of things that people propose and say they want in the product in upcoming releases. Workday does this for the customers and suggestions do get put into the product. I've never heard of something like this being done with any other product.

There are other enhancements that go untended that have been languishing for years. I am interested in one feature now and the development just is not spending the time to fix it. They are good but they are not perfect. You can see that they are trying to meet client needs. Using that as an example, you can only put a certain task in certain BPs. Additional data can only be an action item in a few business processes like Hire, Change Job, etcetera. The idea is that users would like the option for the additional data to be available in other areas.

Another example is the default field in Questionnaires. People have asked that the field not be required as a default. Little things like this you can workaround, but it's the little things that are kind of nice. On the other hand, little things get less attention in brainstorming so they get less attention in development.

I would say that it is a very stable product. 

I think it is extremely scalable if you have the money for it. You can have 5 employees using it or you can have 300,000 employees on it all using Workday globally. Scalability isn't a problem.

The customer service is pretty responsive and there is also a pretty good community. The Workday community is a closed user community guided by Workday but mostly comprised of user contributions. There are Workday contributions, questions, guides, administrative discussions, support — all that sort of thing. Users really invest time to help each other and it is a great support system. No other product has something quite like that. The Workday technical customer support system is in addition to and above-and-beyond that. It really provides a broader opportunity to learn and contribute.

The installation is complex. There are two reasons for this. One is that you need a Workday partner to implement the setup for you. In order to be a partner, you have to have an organization or group of consultants who are trained by Workday to implement the product and support it. It is a closed environment and Workday keeps everything pretty much in check. It is complex in the fact that you have to have somebody — either Workday or a Workday partner — implement it for you.

The deployment will usually anywhere from three months to 12 months or more. It depends on the number of users or the number of modules and how complex the expectations are for the implementation. All the different flavors of how complicated an organization wants the implementation to be — all that becomes a factor in the length of the deployment.

The number of people required for maintenance on Workday varies around the same sort of desire for complexity. You usually have at least one person in-house to watch the implementation and you will have a contract with somebody to supply you with support. That might be a partner contracted for 800 hours a year or whatever the specific terms might be. Then you "lose it as you use it" or you have an ongoing maintenance contract with somebody.

Licensing costs are tiered. When you add different modules, it adds to your cost. For example, you can pay for Payroll functionality or you pay for the Benefits module. The more pieces you add, the more you pay.

I can't say what a particular company may value or see as a true return on investment. I would say that it is expensive — it is the most expensive one out there. In my opinion, you would get a clear return on investment. Different businesses would account for that in different ways.

Our clients like to look at some of the bigger names like PeopleSoft, Ceridian's Dayforce, and maybe a few other major competing products. Workday beats them all. In my opinion, they are leaps and bounds above the competition. Part of the reason is that it is built with modern technology. It has no legacy coding in it at all.

I've been in the HR/Payroll product domain for about 25 years, so I've been involved in the development of Ceridian's applications and other companies as well. I know a lot about other products and competitors.

Workday is a bit different, but I love it. You get used to it. It is like back-in-the-day when HR and the payroll system used to be the determining factor in whether you got to have a company laptop or not.

One piece of advice to anyone considering this as a solution is to implement it properly. Spend the time and do it right the first time. Don't rush the requirements, don't skip steps just to get to a stage of deployment. Do your requirements properly. Consider everything beforehand. Don't leave things till later that you should do now. It will be worth the extra time that you invest. That is really true for everyone and every implementation, but especially for Workday. Trying to go back in after the fact and change things is just really complicated and it is a real pain. Skipping steps to get it implemented is a big thing that we notice that clients do.

We have often had to go back and fix something that a client overlooked or looked past. There's always something changing, there's always something that wasn't done correctly. There's always some tweaking afterward. The more tweaking you avoid by doing it right, the less you pay to get it fixed.

After releases, 99 percent of the time it is great and it will not introduce issues. In my experience, it is really rare for issues to crop up or that those issues are so extreme that a client will have to roll an upgrade back. I find that the releases are really well-tested and well-managed. They have two releases a year and in those two releases, they are usually pretty good at getting new features out there.

On a scale from one to ten with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Workday as an 8. Having had 25 years of being involved in the development of other Ceridian products, the development of some other products and having to work with PeopleSoft as a customer, Workday is right there with the best of them.

Workday is easy to use. Timesheet and resource management are also easy.

The solution has to work a lot on financial integrations, material management and CRM modules. 

I have been working with the solution for three to four years. 

Workday is scalable, and we have 40,000 users for it. 

The tool's customer support is good. 

Positive

Workday has saved us time by at least 40 per cent. 

The tool is easy to maintain and requires around two to three people. Workday is flexible, but SAP and Oracle are better regarding integration with other products and stability. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use Workday for the management of extensive leave applications in familiar industries. The primary use cases are for employment management.

I'm not a user. I don't get too involved in that.

I don't have any issues with this solution.

Workday is a secure product.

The dashboard is fine, but the dashboarding and other aspects could be improved.

The user interface can be enhanced.

I have been using Workday for four or five years.

Workday is stable. I have not had any issues with it.

Workday is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 100 users in our company.

I am not aware of any plans to increase usage by the company.

Technical support is always available. I don't have any concerns with technical support.

In terms of RP products, I work with UiPath, Studio, Orchestrator, and AI Center, which are included with UiPath. Process mining is available, but I have not used it. Perhaps I'll use it in the future.

I use Office and other activities on a regular basis, but nothing specific.

We don't use Microsoft because we have our own tools. We have internal resources.

It was easy to install. 

I was not involved with the deployment. I can't do it because I don't know how to do it.

It has an annual subscription rate, but I'm not sure how it will work.

I would recommend this solution to anyone who is interested.

I would rate Workday an eight out of ten.

Our HR team use it to manage all employee information and processes. 

 It is easy to use and straightforward.

This solution could be made easier to use by continuing to release new improvements. 

I have been using this solution for six months. 

This is a stable solution. 

I have not needed to contact customer support. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution as part of our hospital administration.

The solution really is so simple to use for the end-user.

If you're one of those end-users that need reports, it will create it for you on the fly. The search engine for creating reports is so of-the-moment. I've not found that any place else - and I have either vetted or worked with the top 150 of the HRS platforms out there. 

The report creation just makes sense. It's AI-driven, which some of these older programs that are out there are not yet. With AI, it's continuously building, so that the more you use it, the more it becomes comfortable with who you are. Essentially, in the case of a hospital, it's 9,000 different users over seven campuses, and those are individual users. They're not being treated as part of all the nurses, as it depends on how they use it. 

The mobile platform works very well. It's very seamless. It is very self-serving, as the op center of the hospital was shut down early, several months early. Therefore, the clients, if you will - in this instance, the doctors and nurses, and so forth, and the other employees - found the mobile app to be very, very comfortable and very easy to go back and forth on. It even gives you a mini screenshot of where you were before, kind of like you do with TV. And that was helpful. It made it so that you didn't have to go in and out all the time. It would just take you on a journey that was self-created. 

The solution is going faster and smoother than ever. It's really working well.

We used the solution alongside Epic briefly. Epic was used as a training platform. I can't really speak to the process, however, it's my understanding that its training is even better than Workday's.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The seven hospitals weren't really used to talking to each other previously and now they're going to have to. It's helping to integrate them all together.

The solution was very good at reconfiguration and customization of their software. It helped us to meet federal regulations.

The cost of Workday is certainly not inexpensive. It's very pricey.

If your data is not very clean, it does make for a bit of a mess. It was part of the reason why we had to bring Epic in. 

I have found, within the hospital experience, that Workday's overall contribution to making healthcare better was lacking. Without a doubt, COVID has forced companies to be more responsive to the needs, and so forth, within a hospital system, healthcare, whatever. And as such, within a matter of months, the technology will exist that all we'll need is a smartphone to do enterprise-level type of work. You will no longer need a tablet, for example. You will no longer need a PC as official intelligence would have taken over. 

They're a leader in the market. I just wish the price would come down and they will continue to work really hard on making AI what it could be for them.

They've got to continue to grow, as they can get behind very, very quickly in the AI space. As quickly as AI is able to interpret what you now want as fast as the market's going to change. They need to stay on top of it, or they will get left behind.

I probably used the solution in and out of either the projects I've been managing; or as a part of my consulting work, or as a part of a direct-hire employment situation. I would say I've used the solution since 2013. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable. We fixed everything in the very beginning. There were some older Microsoft platforms in those hospitals. One of them went back to Windows 2000. Nonetheless, those had to be brought in and upgraded first, to make the portfolio work across everything, all channels. The challenge was the older process systems that were already in place. 

The scalability is amazing. If you do your homework, you take care of making sure your data is clean and that you've got key messengers and all that change management, certainly being very agile in this process, as it just makes things easier. 

It integrates well too, which helps you expand. We'll be using Salesforce and Google will be our search engine. Google is offering $100,000 worth of advertising on their platform for free. Once we get up and going, and that's more of recruiting, advertising, obviously, solicitation of funds. Then, we're just nailing down whether or not Salesforce and PowerSchool are going to integrate well together, doing exactly what we need and not off-the-shelf. The big difference is going on in the background. And they're working very hard on it.

Within the hospital, we have 9,000 users on the solution.

Technical support was a critical part for us. They come in late with reconfiguration in order to meet federal guidelines. The hospital was state-mandated and had a lot of state-mandated requirements. Technical support really was amazing at coming in and customizing and reconfiguring the software to get the necessary federal funds. 

They were extremely helpful and responsive. I'd rate them nine and a half out of ten overall.

The client had actually used ADP. From a software point of view, ADP was originally a loan/bookkeeping company/accountancy up in New York. That's how they started. It just grew, grew and grew and grew like Microsoft and actually had Microsoft as a layer on it. They began to offer brokerage services, and then HR as well. It wasn't a part of their original mandate. 

There was a push to move to something bigger, faster, and more AI-driven.

ADP also owns the data. That's part of the cost to move away from it and that will cost you a minimum of $50,000, no matter what size company you are. That is to just retrieve your own data about your own people from them.

The initial setup is very straightforward. That’s the amazing thing about it. Epic is able to explain to you the processes of getting what you need. It's AI-driven, and once you get on there are certain templates necessary that you've got to have. You have got to go in and reregister yourself, however, it's already pulled all the information.

For us, on the hospital project, there was a whole lot of front-end work that had to be done. However, that's why we wanted the solution - to tie all this together and have it centralized, at least the data processing and data mining aspects.

The smartest thing the hospital did is they rolled everything out by business unit. They made sure that each campus was well integrated and then there was a final assimilation. That was smart on their part, as opposed to saying, “All the nurses have this now, and all the doctors have this, all the ERs can work on it now.”

The solution is pricey. However, the cost of implementation is probably half of what I have been used to in my 20 years of doing this project work. The cost has come down, which they do to be more competitive, obviously. 

I found the opportunity with their technicians to do it almost an about-face between public and private websites in the cloud I just found that amazing. It was almost like it predicted what's going to happen. Of course, the project started a good six months before COVID actually hit, however, it was impressive, they were ready to handle their client's needs well before their clients knew they'd need it.

I looked at a lot of different options. There are 850 different HRS EOP platforms in the United States right now. It took me two years to narrow it down to 150, and then from there really looked at 15. I presented those to the executive board and we further narrowed it down to six.

We're a partner with Workday.

An organization considering the solution needs to first organize its requirements. That was the hardest part for us. That was the part that had to be fleshed out by my executives as to what we really wanted. That took a long time, I'm not going to kid you. However, it's a very important part of the process - especially due to the fact that there are so many solutions to choose from and you really need to understand what you need in order to get to which solution is best suited.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Workday is currently being used for all finance and accounting, i.e., time and expense, expense reimbursement, and payroll benefits. We're currently still expanding it where there are projects still ongoing.

Workday has improved our organization by being a centralized spot for payroll and benefits information. We use it extensively and plan on expanding our use. 

The payroll and benefits engine is the most valuable Workday solution in my opinion. It is also easy to access. 

The expenses and reimbursements module could be improved. Creating expense reports is time-consuming and inefficient compared to other expense solutions.

Workday could also be easier to use. 

I have been using Workday for two years. 

Workday's stability is fine. It's a cloud product, so it's not going to shut down on us.

Workday is probably the most scalable human capital management platform out there. We probably have more than 4,000 users, most of whom are using it for tracking time, expenses, payroll, and benefits. Also, the accounting department uses it as their ERP. 

We previously used a very old, end-of-life system. 

I was not part of the initial Workday setup so I don't really know.

We used a third-party vendor for the initial deployment and it took about a year and a half or so. 

I don't think we evaluated other solutions before going with Workday. 

The advice I would give to others considering Workday is to know that it's big and time-consuming. I would rate this solution a seven out of ten

We use Workday for employee benefits. 

Workday is a holistic HR solution. 

The solution needs to be updated with generative UI. 

I have been working with the solution for three years. 

The solution is stable. 

Workday is very scalable, and my company has more than 50 users. 

Workday's installation is straightforward. 

We deployed the product in-house. 

I rate the product a nine out of ten. 

The primary use case will be different for each company, but we use it for HTM and reporting. We use it to consolidate your HR system into one source of data. That's generally why people want to implement Workday, so they can have one source of data for better collaboration and reporting and C-level reports, stats and things like that.

The business process framework is excellent. You can create a business process very easily using the drag and drops. You don't need to get an IT consultant to be able to use Workday, you can have people in the business that aren't IT consultants putting new works processes together. So that's really good to use. The Workday experience is definitely the best on the market. There's no doubt about that.

Something that can be improved, is legislation within a country. There's something about paying dues in the country for legal requirement that's provided by SAP success factors, but it's not the case with Workday.

Another thing that can be better, is the flexibility of the screens. Sometimes I find it hard to customize the screen and that is quite frustrating. But that's actually one of their selling points as well. So they are pretty good, I have to say. 

Setting up reports can be a bit tricky, and I've also noticed that integration with payroll can sometimes be an issue with Workday. 

The solution is extremely stable.

The scalability is not a problem and it's very scalable. It is condensed so that it can grow with your company. People usually think that Workday could only be used for large companies, but actually it can be just as good for growing medium-sized companies. The solution can easily scale because of the business process framework. 

I've read on the reviews that the technical support is good, but I haven't used them yet.

Workday is an expensive solution.

We looked at SAP SuccessFactors and in terms of the functional checklists, they're very similar. So if you've got a company and if you look at the functional requirements list or business requirements list, generally they will both meet the requirements of their customer. Workday definitely has the edge in terms of the user experience side of things. If you want to be a bit more flexible in terms of your customizations, then success factors are definitely more flexible and there are a lot more opportunities to customize your requirements, but that's not always a good thing. I would say that, in terms of collaboration with other customers' work, they've probably got the edge on that. SAP's success factors isn't quite as good with a full team, although they are good from the reporting side of it. So I think it really depends on each customer or each client's needs. It depends on what your requirements are and what you're looking for in terms of maintenance going forward, and in having a simple a fit. 

With Workday you know there's one source of data that works and you literally have one pocket of data that you can pull from, and that makes reporting a lot easier. The user experience is better because of this one source of data. 

But Workday is very expensive. So the question I always ask, is if there is really that much more that you're getting from Workday based on how much you're spending.  

My advice to others would be to make sure that they understand their requirements. They must have detailed process requirements, and if they see some gaps, they should identify those gaps up front. Workday can be flexible in this regard, so customers should understand what they need to do. 

On a scale of one to ten, my rating for this solution is a nine. In the next version I would like to see a simpler user interface to create reports.