Workday Reviews

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. 

We use Workday for our employee onboarding and their entire lifecycle. We try to use certain aspects of Workday, such as currency management. For example, if they put in their expenses and they need to have them reimbursed, we use Workday.

Before the onboarding process, they have the hiring process, then they enter the recruitment phase. Once the recruitment is complete in Workday, they have to create a profile for these employees in the system.

The main data will always be in Workday. You are using it as a CRM.

The platform itself is very robust and I generally like the reporting and analytics capability.

The UI, UX (user experience) is very bad. It is not very interactive. As a user, when they look at Workday, they find it difficult to navigate. If they have any queries, I am not able to launch a case. I have to find a solution to my issues.

For an IT user, it might look like a large platform but from an end-user perspective or someone new to IT, they will find it to be very difficult.

In the next release, I would like to see better case management, knowledge management, improve the UI/UX, and provide more integration options.

Also, I would like to see it become more user-friendly.

I have been using Workday for six months to one year.

It's pretty stable. The coding platform is very solid, which means it's pretty stable.

This solution is scalable.

The availability of technical support could be better. The wait time could be reduced. The resolution time could be faster.

I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

We are currently using ServiceNow and we integrate it with Workday.

The initial setup is pretty simple.

You may need some help, but it's not very complex.

Depending on the complexities, it can take two to three months to deploy.

I am working with a product called ServiceNow, but we use Workday for some interfaces. We help with the integration and data from Workday. We are using Workday for our client's companies. 

Our company is part of Bitpro and we use our internal systems.

The technical support needs to improve in reducing their wait time.

If they have time, then I would suggest the look at ServiceNow. They have the platform to cater to other departments, from customer service to security or IT service management.

If you don't have a large number of business requirements where you want to be complete within six months, the Workday would be a good option.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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.

I'm doing high-level research - I analyze the HCM market for some academic research. So, it's not really a business initiative.

Stability in one single version is the most valuable feature of this solution. It's actually a cloud-native solution and based on the community for development. It is a very good open architecture and able to interconnect with other systems. And it is very stable and very fast in terms of response.

Reporting system should be improved. It is quite static based on historical data. It misses features relative with predictive analytics. For the data-driven organization, it is not on par. The second area that needs improvement is localization with the different jurisdictions.

It is very stable and fast in terms of response.

It is highly scalable.

I was completely satisfied with the technical support, the interface, and the performance.

It was local and basically all spread, so each country used their own local HR system. So we didn't replace HCM by HCM.

I am just a consultant and we don't have any formal association with any software vendor for ethical principles.

I was completely satisfied with the technical support. There are no bugs or performance issues.

I have used SAP HCM and Oracle Taleo.

I would rate it an eight 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.

Performance and good usability are the two most valuable features of this solution. 

It has missing functionalities. Specific countries, like Germany, didn't have the option to do payroll. Now we need to look for another product for HR. Then it becomes complicated because then it takes time to integrate. The workforce management also needs improvement. 

In the next release, I would like a complete full-stack for HR, especially payroll abilities in all countries. At a high-level, this solution has everything else that is needed. 

It's very stable. We haven't had big problems with it. 

It's absolutely scalable. It's a cloud solution, it's built for scalability. This product is built for the cloud which is why it's extremely scalable. 

Customers said that they have a good knowledge-base community. 

The initial setup was easy. It's on the cloud, so you just set how many users you need and they activate it and that's it. 

The setup normally takes around a week. The time it takes depends on the technicalities and functionalities. 

I would rate Workday a seven out of ten. No software would get a ten because there is no existing software on the market that is perfect. 

This is our one system for data and analytics, which is mobile-enabled and has a nice UX.

The solution has allowed leaders to self-serve. We have fewer systems, less manual data entry, and less processing. 

The most valuable feature is the HCM, where all of the information and processes are in one place.

There is a lot of complexity in the configuration of this solution.

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.