SAP SuccessFactors alternatives and competitors

Workday is an HR management or a talent management tool. It is basically the full suite of HR core processes. It has got modules within it for benefits for HR administration and talent acquisition. 

We have been able to reduce the administrative burden of HR so that HR can focus more on strategic activities rather than administrative work. It also provides better visibility in reporting on benefits.

It helps the users to enroll for the benefits automatically and update their life events without the involvement of HR individuals or back-office staff. It enables a person to take action on their own. It reduces the administrative burden on HR and puts the ownership on the person that is going through the life event, whether it is having a child, taking a leave of absence, or something else. 

There are easy ways to integrate Workday with your common benefits. At least in the USA, it can be integrated with common benefits providers such as Fidelity, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, etc. It has got a connector that is able to connect with the vendor or the third party to which you are trying to send the eligibility file. It basically allows us to automate or set up the tool, and the integration with the provider is a lot quicker than competing tools. 

When it comes to reporting on just eligibility and SLSA, it is a lot more user-intuitive. Depending on the purpose of what you are doing, you can grant security rights or roles, for example, you can control whether someone is a benefits administrator doing an independent audit. Workday makes it very easy to do that. It significantly simplifies the reporting process. 

It is very unique as compared to other tools in terms of the employee master data and how it is organized. That's why sometimes the information needs to sit in two different systems because, in Workday, it is organized differently. This issue is not related to benefits. It is more or so related to how you categorize employees. I don't think this is a problem that could be solved. Workday is aware of this. It is one of those kinds of situations that you just got to live with.

I have been using Workday since 2013.

It is very stable, but obviously, it is all about how you set it up and configure it. At the end of the day, the technology works. It is all about setting it up the right way.

We use it across the organization for all 10,000 employees. As we hire more or acquire more companies, it is definitely going to be used more.

We have around 10,000 users, and about 4,000 of them are back-office employees. That would be HR, finance, supply chain, and IT. The other half of the organization is using it sparingly, but this is the revenue-generating workforce that is sitting in the field. These could be plant workers, plant supervisors, and craft labor. Basically, we just log in to look at their paycheck and other things, but we use the app to look at their leave balances.

They do a great job of selling the tool, but for support, you are kind of on your own. You either decide to go with a vendor to support you, or you build capabilities in-house. It is a common model. I know it sounds like they are leaving you out to dry, but in today's day and age, this is a common model with most providers.

If we need additional stuff that we are not getting, they are great at providing that. In terms of supporting the application, I can't even rank them because, frankly, they don't do it. It is something for which we have to pay an external vendor to provide the service.

We went from Legacy ERP to Workday. We switched because of its simplicity, ease of use, and a lot simpler and easier user interface.

The initial setup was complex but manageable. I have worked on a couple of deployments. The last one within the last year was supposed to take eight months, but it took a year and a half. That was mainly because of the integrations taking a lot longer than I anticipated and problems with the vendor who was implementing it. The vendor did a series of missteps that didn't help.

We had an implementation partner who didn't do a very good job. We have 10 to 20 people to maintain it, but it depends on the complexity of your configuration and builds. 

You have the license fee per module, and then you have a kind of annual training fee, which is a kind of add-on. I wouldn't say it is exhaustive; it is minor. Licensing is pretty transparent for most of the part.

We considered all the top leading HCM solutions, such as SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM, and UltiPro. It was a $5 million to $10 million investment for us.

I would advise making sure that your HR data is clean. Take your time. Everybody is eager to implement a new shiny toy, but a lot of cleanups are required to get your house in order. You have got to clean up your HR data and make sure that there are no duplicate employees, people are assigned to the right job descriptions, and there are no such people who are terminated but still sit in your organization. When you actually migrate the data, all such issues will create a lot of problems. 

It is a leading talent management tool, and it has got the largest market share. I would rate Workday a ten out of ten.

This solution is being used for the core HR payroll, it's self-service for our 6,000 employees.  They have access to the solution and can do anything on it; request vacation, check their payslip, anything related to business trips, basically everything that goes through the system. All HR-related services are online for users to access from their mobile phone, computer or through a chat bot. It's also connected to a biometric solution, where attendance is pushed into Ramco so if there is an attendance correction required, it can be approved by the manager. The core HR team runs the payroll and all other HR activities. These three core areas are covered through the solution. We are customers of Ramco HCM and I'm the company IT director. 

This solution has saved the company a lot of time. It used to be that if you wanted to request vacation and you were in a remote location, it could take up to 45 days to complete that process. Now it can take a couple of days and maximum a couple of weeks, depending on the approval number. Everything is online, transparent and usable for all the employees.

During our initial process, we identified one of the major reasons for our employee attrition rate, was due to issues of this kind. Employees were not happy with their travel visas and 73% were unhappy with the manual forms. It was one of the main reasons for implementing the solution. 

The flexibility of the payroll aspect is a key feature and we haven't had a single issue related to that. In general, the solution is very flexible and can be configured in multiple ways. We have a lot of expatriates working here in Saudi Arabia, so the payroll is quite complex with the variety of requirements for different types of employees. It's all configurable in the system without any issues and not a single point was left out which used to happen when we were using SAP. 

Not all of our employees have access to computers so it's helpful that the system works well on a mobile application as a chat mode or using the mailing function. When a request comes in you can directly respond, which is very much appreciated by the senior management team because they don't have to log in to a solution to approve something.

The one area where I would like to see some improvement would be the mobile app and web page user experience which could be more user friendly. 

We went live and a month later COVID started and there were a lot of issues. That said, we've been able to manage everything without any trouble. 

Scalability is good. We started the solution immediately with all our 6,000 employees and performance is stable. It has required some fine tuning for the department sectors. Next year we'll go for the phase two implementation and add two more modules, which is recruitment and training, and performance management.

There is a portal which mostly runs on Jira. We create a ticket and there is an agreed timeline and we have an escalation metric in case of problems. We have an account manager assigned to us, so we talk to them in case we require some priorities. There is usually a monthly scheduled meeting where we review all the scheduled tickets and statuses. We haven't had many issues since we went live. 

We previously used SAP HCM. 

The implementation was very smooth compared to an SAP implementation. We had a project team made up of HR staff, IT, finance, and representatives from all project areas. Mostly it was driven by the HR team and one consultant from Ramco on site. It was very straightforward. 

From an employee satisfaction perspective we do have a ROI. This is the first time we have a solution which is running across the board and the HR team are happy. Their salaries are going out on time and they are happy. The solution doesn't make money so a ROI calculation is difficult to judge. 

The license is not a subscription model. It's not the SaaS subscription model, but otherwise it runs like an SaaS. They have three or four different licensing models, but we opted for a perpetual license. We own the license and it's hosted and managed by Ramco. It's very straightforward, you could choose a public option or something that's on an SaaS subscription model or you can have your own hosting and your own license. The third option, which we chose, is to have your license hosted by Ramco. We pay the standard, one-time license fee, annual maintenance, and management and hosting charges.

For anyone in the Middle East, I would strongly recommend this solution over SuccessFactors or Workday as the payroll feature is very much localized for the region and it supports all the business requirements without any additional modification. It's very important to prepare yourself, your team and the organization structure data, job descriptions and things like that, before you start the implementation. The master data management is where we had some problems due to discrepancies in job descriptions. We realized that when we uploaded and started building the organizational structure.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

I used it for learning and talent management, employee self-service, and the n2n process for HRIS.

It simplifies everything for human capital management, and all users can do self-enrollment for leaves and those kinds of things. The employee self-service feature is quite a powerful feature for me.

You can install it on your mobile phone or iPad and do your employee service activity there.

I'm currently working for a state-owned government company, and we need to follow some standards and regulations. We also have a strategy to be followed. Sometimes the template and the format are not available in the SAP HCM, so we have to work around this limitation. The tax also sometimes changes in my country, and we have to redo everything to change the payroll calculations, benefits, and things like that.

The talent management feature can be improved. It is currently very simple in SAP HCM. 
SAP is also very hard to integrate. In terms of monitoring, there are no monitoring tools, but as long as we take care of the disk capacity, there is no problem. 

I have been using this solution since 2014. 

It is quite stable because we run it on the IBM AIX platform, which is quite powerful. The CPU allocation is maintained by us. We use the DB2 database. In terms of power, machine performance, and availability, it is quite stable.

It is definitely scalable because we have an on-premises solution. It is very simple to add memory, processor, or disk capacity.

We got the principal support from SAP. We also have support from a business partner to do all the implementation and maintenance. We don't have any issues related to support.

I am also using SuccessFactors. SAP HCM has got talent management, but it is not as detailed as in SuccessFactors. In terms of HR management, SAP HCM has got more features and more details than SuccessFactors.

It is totally customized. The full deployment or rolling it out fully takes one to two years.

SAP is expensive, but if you're using the product, then the expensive product becomes inexpensive. Considering its performance and features, I find it quite reasonable.

The best thing to do is to identify whether you will need integration with other applications or solutions. If you don't look at this aspect in terms of future implementation, it will give you a hard time later on while doing the integration.

I would rate SAP HCM an eight out of ten.

We are using IBM Kenexa for onboarding employees.

It reduces the amount of time it takes to share drives and search for a person. It is quicker joining documents when you can just put in a person's name and find the entire onboarding history and recruitment options. 

That makes it easy because it's all centralized, it's easy to download and navigate.

The most valuable features are that we can upload documents and download them on demand. This is very useful. It could be joining documents, or employment screening, or your employment history. 

It's easy enough to upload, find, and retrieve whatever you are looking for.

It does not synchronize well with other ERP tools, such as SuccessFactors or Workday.

I would like to have a better and more user-friendly interface. It needs to be a bit more intuitive. It's not as intuitive as SuccessFactors.

In the next release, I would like to see a better user interface, better speed, and a bit more customization without having to reach out to IBM.

It is quite stable. There have only been a few IT downtimes. 

Also, it is quite dependent upon how SAP functions. 

It is more or less stable most of the time and in general, I do not have any problems with stability.

It's pretty scalable. It's currently onboard deployment.

As long as you have the server capacity, it's scalable.

My current team supports approximately 20,000 employees. The data for approximately 20,000 employees is uploaded on it, year on year 20,000 to 25,000 a year. We also have 35 people who are active administrators on any given day.

At this moment, we do not have plans to increase our usage because our hiring has come down due to the COVID. There are no current expansion plans, at least until the middle of 2021 maybe 2022, given the current trend.

Technical support has been fantastic. Anything that we raise is generally resolved in 24 hours. 

Complicated issues might take a while, but we haven't had many or even any in the last year.

I have not used another solution prior to IBM Kenexa. I have been using Kenexa for a while.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The deployment was done in-house.

This solution requires maintenance. We have a team that is designated to maintain this it.

I would recommend this solution to others, but I would say make sure that you have the basic infrastructure and training for the people. It's essential.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

PeopleSoft is our HR system. We used it for everything at my old company, including performance appraisal, leave application, employee, master database. This company only uses the performance management module, so we do goal-setting and appraisals through PeopleSoft. 

Mangement also plans to adopt the compensation module. They are currently only using a small part, but they want to use the full module.

Applications for employee leave used to be a problem. Now employees can check their own leave balances and apply for leave accordingly. The leave application automatically flows to the manager, and the manager can approve it also online. Employee performance appraisals are documented online, and past appraisals can be retrieved if needed. 

I'd like PeopleSoft to be like on the cloud and more mobile-friendly. If I try to access it from a cell phone, it's a bit difficult, so it would be great if PeopleSoft could improve these features.

I've been using PeopleSoft since 2011.

PeopleSoft is highly stable. They are still using the system.

Many businesses have been added, so PeopleSoft is highly scalable. We have 8,000 employees, but my previous company was a huge global organization with thousands upon thousands. 

Since I joined this organization, I haven't contacted Oracle support, but we implemented Oracle HRMS in my last company. This was back in 2005 or 2007. At the time, IBM was an implementation partner, and we interacted with Oracle's tech team. We went to Bangalore to meet them, and they were quite helpful.

I've worked for different companies, and each had its own ERP solution. My previous company was using Aramco, but they switched to Oracle. Then I another company with no HR system, so everything was manual, but they implemented SAP. 

I joined my current company in 2011, and they were using PeopleSoft, but they merged with another firm that was using SAP. Now we have a hybrid system. Some of our modules are SAP, and others are SuccessFactors or PeopleSoft. We're also using Cornerstone OnDemand for training, learning, and development. 

I rate PeopleSoft 10 out of 10. I think PeopleSoft is a good tool for HR administrators. It's easy to navigate compared to the other ERPs. The management of the tool is straightforward from the employee's perspective, so the employee experience is good. PeopleSoft is intuitive, so no one needs to be taught how to use the system. It's self-evident, like Facebook or Twitter. SAP is a little more technical, and you need to understand coding.