Workday Reviews

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.

I'm using Workday for human capital management (HCM). It helps me with tasks like managing employee records, tracking time and attendance, and processing payroll.

I like that it's easy to use and flexible. 

The price could be lower.

I've been using Workday for about three months. I use the latest version of Workday.

It's a very stable solution. I would rate the stability a ten on ten. 

It is a scalable solution. We have about 1,000 users using this solution in our organization. 

I have used customer service and support a few times. They were very helpful.

It's very easy to set up and flexible to configure. 

I need to pay for a license. It is expensive.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. I would recommend Workday to other people. 

We use this solution to manage financials, payroll and recruiting.

In a future release we could like to have access to asset, supply and treasury management functionalities.

I have used this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

The API’s have enabled us to really deliver reliable automation to the company. This isn’t just critical, because we can create ease of use, though that is really nice. Reliable, auditable integration has reduced the complexity and cost of our ongoing audits. Users get the access they need, when they need it, and it is removed when we need it removed. Workday, for us, is the tip of the spear for so much of what we do downstream.

If there was something to really point out here, it isn’t what Workday has done or offers, but what it hasn’t done that has been so powerful. We struggled to have successful implementations previously, partly because of our desire/need to implement features and functionality that are uncommon. Workday bases what they do on a large set of customers and the requirements laid out by the law. Being required to color inside the lines has helped us focus on what makes our company unique when it comes to pay, vacation, benefits, etc. Don’t get creative; get it right.

There is too much of a one-at-a-time concept in the workflow. The system is designed with the object model in mind, which is brilliant. Transition from one thing to the next is a never-ending relationship experience. As a leader, however, there are many times when merit and performance are not in isolation and one employee at a time. More thought into seeing the department or departments as a whole would be really valuable.

We use Workday as the source of all employee data. This means that via integrations built in-house, if as a new employee you are onboarded with Workday, you have accounts everywhere else. As a manager, I give it a 3/5. Lots of great data, but since I don't do this all the time, I find it to be not all that intuitive. Much of this may be based on how workflows have been implemented, but it nonetheless leaves much to be desired. Also, while the browser is powerful, the mobile app is so limited it is mostly useless. Lastly, as a power user I would give this a 2/5. So much can be done with the tools, but we constantly run into roadblocks that can only be pushed through with a hard to find, incredibly expensive contract resource. This is the only SaaS product I can think of that we have this experience with.

We went live June 2012 after a six month deployment project.
We use Workday for our HCM and have for several years.

We are an Oracle shop and used the HCM module. The switch was our push to focus on HR as a product in a best-of-breed approach, as the implementation we had in our ERP was largely ignored and disliked.

The technical implementation was straightforward with data dumps and use of their well-documented API’s. The complication came in applying policies to the system and training our users. The complexity was, and continues to be, enabling the power user to take advantage of the power of the tool without reaching out for help.

The beauty of it being a SaaS product is that we are always on the most recent version and we always opt for an early upgrade when there are new releases.

When we priced out this system, it was one of the most expensive solutions when compared straight up with other HCM replacements. The trick is in seeing its total cost now and going forward in comparison to everything else. Between risk reduction, audit reduction and knowing that in many ways we can stop thinking about HR as an issue to solve, we have seen great value. The answer lies in how you want to structure the TCO over ROI.

Don’t dip your toe in the water, jump in. With a solution like this there are great returns to be had, but you need to invest in really using the API’s, building automation with workflows and centralizing HCM here. If you keep recruiting, performance management, etc. outside of the system you will have purchased an airplane so you can drive around the neighborhood.

We are a very large international enterprise company and use the solution for reporting. I'm the Global Payroll Project Manager at our company and we're a customer of Workday.

I haven't had a chance to go into things too deeply yet, but I like that it's intuitive to use, a very usable tool and it's easy to find the data you're looking for. I've worked with SAP before, and that's much more complicated. I also use the My Learning tool regularly. It's very good. 

For now, it's difficult for me to come up with anything that needs improvement. It's possible that the way things are integrated could be improved but if you've used SAP then Workday is actually pretty good. It depends where you've come from. I think they do a good job.

I've been working with the solution for a few months, but the company has been using it for several years. 

It's really stable. We use it globally and have 100,000 employees. And I know that there are no big issues with the stability of the tool.

I worked with Oracle previously and I prefer the Workday interface. I also prefer the Workday reporting.

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

It is our HR source of data. It performs okay.

It stores everything for the employee. It has also been able to store the information that we use for our payroll demand.

It is quite user-friendly. We can store all the employee data information on it.

I cannot really use Workday, because they don't have worker payroll in the product. We have to solve our payroll. I hope one day they will be able to have their own localized standard payrolls for all countries.

In terms of reporting, we have to rely on a consultant to do the report customization. If we have an employee who is working for two or three countries, we don't have a simple global employee number to keep track of them, because then you have to use a separate employee number for different countries.

The most important thing is to be able to do your own reporting, which it can't do. We rely so much on our consultant to customize reports for us. Also, if you want to have authorization of certain roles, there is a lot of inflexibility in how the authorizations can be set.

For time management, it does not have a calendar generator. For example, if you want to have a shift calendar for an entire year, you need to push the entire year's calendar into the system instead of being able to generate it using a time management pattern.

It is stable.

You must have your internal technical support people be able to follow up after you have gone live. The reason is because there are many things that you can't do as a user, and you need someone to support you technically. Things like customized reporting, user authorizations, and implementation of new modules needs to have someone who is able to do the technicality of your configurations or your customization for you after you have gone live.

We did have another solution previously. We switched because we required something that was available regionally in order for us to keep track of employee data.

With a bigger budget, I would recommend SAP.

I actually preferred SAP HCM. Comparatively, I felt that SAP HCM is more comprehensive, cost competitive, and the salary and payroll in the country is available. It has more in-depth functions that you can actually use, including doing a hot query in SAP. You can even use the data within the system to turn up a report easily without having to depend on a technical consultant to do the customization for you.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• It works for all the countries that we have.
• We are able to implement it.
• It can handle all the necessary modules within the system, such as authorization of benefits and time management.

• By leveraging the business process framework that the product delivers, and the built-in workflow, it has forced individuals to be more accountable to their managers and employees. 
• It also enforces cleaner data; you cannot just push data into the system without validations. 
• There is no need for SQL updates to a database to fix data issues.

The flexibility to integrate with the product. It has several tools, out-of-the-box, for integrations. It delivers pre-built interfaces for specific vendors, pre-built generic integrations to extract or push data into Workday through configuration.  

Workday also delivers tools that allow you to build your own custom interfaces.  So for me it is the ease of integration with the product. 

In addition to the integration tools, I would also say the system being a fully consolidated system. All the transactions and configuration are co-located in one fully in-memory system, so there is no need to go to different data sources (multiple DBs) to pull data; it’s all in one place.

Analytical tools have needed improvement. Workday has just released Prism Analytics, to replace the current analytical tools, so it’s in the early stages.  Workday has great reporting capabilities today, but if we don’t have a fully consolidated system we need the ability to marry that external data with the Workday data to perform analytics. Prism will enable this to occur.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Leveraging community, and the ability to open cases with Workday, allows for quick turnaround with both other Workday users and the Workday team itself.

In the beginning it is difficult to wrap your head around the in-memory pieces, and which configuration drives what functionality. It’s like any other software in that manner, and it’s about digging in and learning it.

Implement what you need, purchase what you need as you need it.

I would highly recommend it to anyone. It’s the only fully consolidated in-memory application on the market.

We are using several modules of Workday for the employees in our organization.

We were using an on-premises application in the past. The upgrade time for that application used to be a project in itself, lasting one year. With Workday being a cloud application and SaaS model, the upgrade process is no more a nightmare. It gets updated overnight.

The support team for this on-premises application used to be a larger team. Now it is a smaller team. We have reduced the staff that supports this application, and there is no cost for the upgrade. There is an update every six months, and it is free. 

The reporting feature is quite easy for a layman to use, and the look and feel of the application is good. Its security is robust. You will never find a use case that cannot be covered.

They don't offer any backend database access. This is one limitation that I found in this product. Workday hasn't opened up about what kind of database they are into, which can make it easy for the technical team to emulate issues. It would be good if they can offer backend access to the technical team. 

It would be helpful if they can also provide a Troubleshooting Guide that we can use to troubleshoot issues. When we have an issue, there are very limited resources to refer to.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is a very steady product. Its reliability is 100%. Of late, we haven't experienced any bug that we had to report to Workday.

They have recently come up with a feature using which the clients can customize, but we are yet to explore it. Our HR partner, Skills partner, and Talent partner are the users of this solution. We also have technical teams to manage its integration. 

We haven't adapted this solution a hundred percent because it can never be a hundred percent. You always have the scope to grow. They keep on coming up with new features, and it takes time to adapt to those features. By the time you do that, they come up with more features.

I never used their support.

We were using Oracle PeopleSoft. We switched primarily because of the cost and our requirement to upgrade to the cloud. Basically, we were looking to migrate from the on-premises model. A cloud application is much faster than an on-premises application. 

The initial setup is quite easy. Anyone who has the domain knowledge can do it. It was around a seven-month journey. We implemented it module-wise in various phases. We did two modules per month. We first did the Team module. After that, we went into the Absence module and then into the Performance module.

We had a dedicated convergent team with two people, a functional team with four experts, and an integration team with four people for integrating it with other third-party stuff. It was an eight to ten members team, and it took six months for the full-fledged implementation.

It is pretty early to comment on that. We will analyze this as we proceed with the application, but as of now, we are seeing more employee engagement. Employees are kind of spending more time using the application as compared to our previous on-premises HR solution. We can do surveys in the application, make announcements using dashboards, and do other such things to engage employees with the application.

Its price is pretty high. It is more expensive than what is offered by other competitors in the market.

It was a long list of vendors, and we had taken demos from all. It was like a four-month journey for us before we arrived at a conclusion. As compared to other solutions, Workday is on the costlier side. It is costlier than what is being offered for similar products from Oracle and other vendors, but from the stability perspective, it has got good credibility. What we saw from the demo matched what we were looking for.

I would advise others to be cautious while selecting a product. Selecting the product is a crucial phase, and you have to know whether the product meets your requirements because you have really limited customization options in a cloud product. 

There is a great amount of support from Workday for implementation. There are also implementation partners in the market.

I would rate Workday an eight out of ten.