Workday Software Review

HCM and Payroll Software Capabilities

Additional Human Capital Management (HCM) system capabilities that are normally reviewed during the Payroll software selection process include the following:

Compensation Management

Focused on flexible compensation plan design; compensation process definitions; compensation rules assignment; compensation-performance linkage; and analysis, this payroll software is Workday's solution for the creation and management of employee compensation plans—and seeks to consolidate employee compensation across multiple plans, teams, and geographies. This consolidation of compensation data can deliver near real-time visibility, thereby, permitting timely course corrections or assurance of the links between compensation, performance management and business objectives. With this payroll software, companies can define and manage global compensation plans (including base pay, variable pay, equity, and allowances); roll out multi-plan, multi-target, and multi-currency compensation processes to global teams; set compensation budgets (based on bottom-up targets, performance goals, or top-down funding); and drill-down into performance-based pay results to ensure top performers are appropriately compensated.

Workday's Mobile Functionality

Although slow to really embrace mobility, it would appear as though the company’s mobile capabilities have finally received some much needed attention. Workday now sees mobility as the crux of the user experience (predicting 90% mobility utilization by its customers). Additionally, the company is pumping functionality into its mobile offerings—building upon capabilities most successive releases. Workday mobility is strong in analytics (given Workday’s strong presence in this area), offers increasingly requested features such as MSS (Manager Self-Service), Workfeed activity streams, time-off balances, and requests/approvals, and ubiquitous delivery via HTML5. Continued updates are expected to revolve around navigation and user experience.

Global Software Capabilities

Currently, direct payroll processing for the Workday software is limited to the U.S. and Canada; however, it should be noted that with other payroll options, global capabilities can be extended. Specifically, multinationals can apply Web services to integrate with existing payroll vendors in the Workday Integration Cloud—a seemingly pragmatic approach but could unfortunately still result in the customer organization having to manage individual country vendors themselves. This same principle does apply to other HR and payroll software functions, but is most often leveraged in the context of Workday’s talent management applications. That said, the application does support multi-currency management and a number of languages, including Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, French (Canadian), French (continental), German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. Also, with an ever-growing bevy of satellite offices springing up around the globe, it is possible that Workday could have feet-on-the-street for local office support in a chosen locale soon if it doesn’t currently.

Workday Analytics

Even a cursory glance at the Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics capabilities of the Workday system is enough to get the sense that an incredible amount of thought, effort, investment, and foresight has gone into the company’s embedded analytics tools. To begin with, Workday has tackled the issue of the bolt-on analytics solution—an issue that almost every enterprise has at some point in time incurred. Workday has embedded analytics into its HCM and payroll software so that data does not have to be exported out into Cognos, BusinessObjects, Hyperion, or any other data warehouse. Indeed, from pre-built and configurable dashboards, worklets, alerts, reports, and analytics, the application has been designed for two very specific functions: to empower users to easily build and share custom reports (without specialized IT skills), and to grant customers the ability to simply and quickly access reports and analytics anytime and anywhere—with a user experience comparable to the consumer Internet.

Because this BI is built directly into Workday’s software, it gives customers the ability to access and interrogate data, analyze and manipulate that data, and take appropriate action—all directly from the HCM system. Further, with the multi-dimensional drill-down capabilities that allow action to be taken in the HR or payroll system, business insight is dynamic and fast. Reports can be custom-built, or customers have the option of leveraging one of 200+ packaged reports. Regardless of approach, customers can net insight in context based on user, role, organization, position, location, activity, and more—automatically triggering alerts when exception conditions occur or pre-established thresholds are exceeded. Workday has also established a strategic relationship with Tidemark to enhance user experiences and push the technology envelope further on Tidemark’s predictive analytics.

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