Workday Payroll and HR Software Review

Workday Strengths and Weaknesses

Workday’s competitive positioning in the payroll (and wider HR) software market can be summarized by highlighting the following strengths and weaknesses:

Workday Strengths
 

• A SaaS solution that is fully integrated and adept at working with business, financial and workforce data.
• Workday put out three releases per year as standard – every four months new HR software feature sets and capabilities are available.
• The average deployment period when implementing Workday as the core HR system of record is 4-8 months.
• At Workday's user conference (Workday Rising) co-CEO Dave Duffield reported that the company's recommendation rate from current customers sits at a huge 96% (well above market average).
• The deployment of in-memory computing greatly improves transaction processing.
• Workday leveraging of multi-tenant SaaS architecture and its modern object model stands out in a market that still features much out-of-date technology.
• Sophisticated mobile and tablet capabilities, such as manager self-service (MSS), are now available.

Workday Weaknesses
 

• The flip side of being cloud-exclusive is that Workday has no offline operational capabilities, therefore user access to HR data is not possible unless connected to the internet.
• Workday does not support on-premises or private cloud payroll/HR software deployments.
• A fix for Workday’s in-bound integration capabilities is said to be in the pipeline; until then customers cannot receive net payroll data without going the route of getting consolidated payroll reporting direct from the payroll aggregator itself.
• Workday fails to make the most of its cutting edge architecture in its marketing efforts; emphasizing this feature has potential to increase sales power.
• Though the partnerships with payroll aggregators Patersons and SGWI are sound, and are in all likelihood able to provide Workday customers with basic functionality, Workday's clients with large, non-U.S. (other than Canada), single-country employee populations may require additional payroll management capabilities. That same logic applies to smaller companies that may have limited numbers of geographically-dispersed employees and see an aggregator relationship as not being cost-effective.
• The faceted search feature is mostly confined to Workday data, forcing users to look outside of the system for deeper analytic capabilities.
• For buyers looking for payroll as part of a broader solution, the Workday software is not nearly as broad as Oracle, SAP, Infor and other major ERP software suites, thus necessitating a multi-vendor IT strategy (and increasing IT resources and expenditure in the managing of those multiple vendors, utilizing multiple vendor toolkits, performing system integration, coordinating mixed date vendor upgrades, etc.).
• Likewise for those seeking a broader HCM solution, Workday does not have recruitment and/or an on-boarding functionality; unlike competitors such as Ultimate Software.

Next - Workday Best Fit and Competitors >>