Workday Reviews

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.

We support the tool. There are users who are using Workday. If there's an issue while they are using Workday, we see what's the issue and help them resolve it.

The product is useful for storing employee records.

The product must include payroll features.

I have been using this solution since 2018. I am using the latest version of the solution.

I rate the product’s stability a six out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a six out of ten. Around 30,000 people are using the solution in our organization.

I rate the ease of setup a six out of ten. The product is not easy to implement. It is difficult to understand the setup at first. The tool is not that informative for us to understand the whole picture. The solution is deployed on the cloud. The deployment took us two years.

The number of people required for deployment depends on the project's size. In our case, it was a global deployment. We needed more than 100 people to deploy the product. If it’s for one company, it can be deployed with fewer people.

I have worked with ERP systems. I could recommend the solution to others. However, people must attend training to understand the tool. Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as part of our hospital administration.

The solution really is so simple to use for the end-user.

If you're one of those end-users that need reports, it will create it for you on the fly. The search engine for creating reports is so of-the-moment. I've not found that any place else - and I have either vetted or worked with the top 150 of the HRS platforms out there. 

The report creation just makes sense. It's AI-driven, which some of these older programs that are out there are not yet. With AI, it's continuously building, so that the more you use it, the more it becomes comfortable with who you are. Essentially, in the case of a hospital, it's 9,000 different users over seven campuses, and those are individual users. They're not being treated as part of all the nurses, as it depends on how they use it. 

The mobile platform works very well. It's very seamless. It is very self-serving, as the op center of the hospital was shut down early, several months early. Therefore, the clients, if you will - in this instance, the doctors and nurses, and so forth, and the other employees - found the mobile app to be very, very comfortable and very easy to go back and forth on. It even gives you a mini screenshot of where you were before, kind of like you do with TV. And that was helpful. It made it so that you didn't have to go in and out all the time. It would just take you on a journey that was self-created. 

The solution is going faster and smoother than ever. It's really working well.

We used the solution alongside Epic briefly. Epic was used as a training platform. I can't really speak to the process, however, it's my understanding that its training is even better than Workday's.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The seven hospitals weren't really used to talking to each other previously and now they're going to have to. It's helping to integrate them all together.

The solution was very good at reconfiguration and customization of their software. It helped us to meet federal regulations.

The cost of Workday is certainly not inexpensive. It's very pricey.

If your data is not very clean, it does make for a bit of a mess. It was part of the reason why we had to bring Epic in. 

I have found, within the hospital experience, that Workday's overall contribution to making healthcare better was lacking. Without a doubt, COVID has forced companies to be more responsive to the needs, and so forth, within a hospital system, healthcare, whatever. And as such, within a matter of months, the technology will exist that all we'll need is a smartphone to do enterprise-level type of work. You will no longer need a tablet, for example. You will no longer need a PC as official intelligence would have taken over. 

They're a leader in the market. I just wish the price would come down and they will continue to work really hard on making AI what it could be for them.

They've got to continue to grow, as they can get behind very, very quickly in the AI space. As quickly as AI is able to interpret what you now want as fast as the market's going to change. They need to stay on top of it, or they will get left behind.

I probably used the solution in and out of either the projects I've been managing; or as a part of my consulting work, or as a part of a direct-hire employment situation. I would say I've used the solution since 2013. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable. We fixed everything in the very beginning. There were some older Microsoft platforms in those hospitals. One of them went back to Windows 2000. Nonetheless, those had to be brought in and upgraded first, to make the portfolio work across everything, all channels. The challenge was the older process systems that were already in place. 

The scalability is amazing. If you do your homework, you take care of making sure your data is clean and that you've got key messengers and all that change management, certainly being very agile in this process, as it just makes things easier. 

It integrates well too, which helps you expand. We'll be using Salesforce and Google will be our search engine. Google is offering $100,000 worth of advertising on their platform for free. Once we get up and going, and that's more of recruiting, advertising, obviously, solicitation of funds. Then, we're just nailing down whether or not Salesforce and PowerSchool are going to integrate well together, doing exactly what we need and not off-the-shelf. The big difference is going on in the background. And they're working very hard on it.

Within the hospital, we have 9,000 users on the solution.

Technical support was a critical part for us. They come in late with reconfiguration in order to meet federal guidelines. The hospital was state-mandated and had a lot of state-mandated requirements. Technical support really was amazing at coming in and customizing and reconfiguring the software to get the necessary federal funds. 

They were extremely helpful and responsive. I'd rate them nine and a half out of ten overall.

The client had actually used ADP. From a software point of view, ADP was originally a loan/bookkeeping company/accountancy up in New York. That's how they started. It just grew, grew and grew and grew like Microsoft and actually had Microsoft as a layer on it. They began to offer brokerage services, and then HR as well. It wasn't a part of their original mandate. 

There was a push to move to something bigger, faster, and more AI-driven.

ADP also owns the data. That's part of the cost to move away from it and that will cost you a minimum of $50,000, no matter what size company you are. That is to just retrieve your own data about your own people from them.

The initial setup is very straightforward. That’s the amazing thing about it. Epic is able to explain to you the processes of getting what you need. It's AI-driven, and once you get on there are certain templates necessary that you've got to have. You have got to go in and reregister yourself, however, it's already pulled all the information.

For us, on the hospital project, there was a whole lot of front-end work that had to be done. However, that's why we wanted the solution - to tie all this together and have it centralized, at least the data processing and data mining aspects.

The smartest thing the hospital did is they rolled everything out by business unit. They made sure that each campus was well integrated and then there was a final assimilation. That was smart on their part, as opposed to saying, “All the nurses have this now, and all the doctors have this, all the ERs can work on it now.”

The solution is pricey. However, the cost of implementation is probably half of what I have been used to in my 20 years of doing this project work. The cost has come down, which they do to be more competitive, obviously. 

I found the opportunity with their technicians to do it almost an about-face between public and private websites in the cloud I just found that amazing. It was almost like it predicted what's going to happen. Of course, the project started a good six months before COVID actually hit, however, it was impressive, they were ready to handle their client's needs well before their clients knew they'd need it.

I looked at a lot of different options. There are 850 different HRS EOP platforms in the United States right now. It took me two years to narrow it down to 150, and then from there really looked at 15. I presented those to the executive board and we further narrowed it down to six.

We're a partner with Workday.

An organization considering the solution needs to first organize its requirements. That was the hardest part for us. That was the part that had to be fleshed out by my executives as to what we really wanted. That took a long time, I'm not going to kid you. However, it's a very important part of the process - especially due to the fact that there are so many solutions to choose from and you really need to understand what you need in order to get to which solution is best suited.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

It has lots of built in reports. I can copy the report and modify it instead of spending time on studying which table is the one I need to use. Each field also has its description, although sometimes it may not be clear what it means. The GUI is beautiful and we don't need to provide much training for the users because it is easy to navigate.

Employee Self-Service and Manager Self-Service are not additional products to implement and they can save time for HR operations. Workday also offers a lot of HR modules that facilitate us to do analysis in one place.

For reporting, Workday only allows users to select which table to join, and it defaults everything. It should allow users to specify the type of join table (inner join / left join / right join / fields to join).

The Payroll module is not usable for Asian countries. It is not possible to customize it the way we want. We need to use another payroll system and build payroll integration.

Payroll integration is terrible. It has a lot of limitations.

I have used Workday for 1.5 years.

Sometimes all our users are unable to log on to Workday or encounter slowness. It usually lasts for around 10 minutes, but it could happen once a week, as far as I have noticed.

We have not had any stability issues.

The group previously used different systems for different countries. We centralize a team of system support for the group. It is more cost efficient in terms of support and maintenance.

Setup was not complex as our implementation partner defaulted most configurations, but it could be wrong. We need to look back after implementation.

We did not have other options, as it is a group decision. If I had an option, I would choose PeopleSoft, because HCM and payroll could be in one system.

Check carefully whether Workday supports payroll in your country; otherwise it takes additional costs and efforts to build integration.