Workday Reviews

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 is basically an HR or employee management solution. It has specific modules for performance management, employee details, career management, etc.

It is a one-stop solution for everything. You can look for information about other employees or you can track your information. There is a directory, so you can search for other employees. You can also see and track your personal details and salary details on the employee profile page. 

It allows you to do everything related to career management. For example, you can give an employee reference. You can also refer people from outside the organization. 

It also helps you with leave management. If you want to apply for leave or track your leaves, you can do that.

I would be happy if it was faster. Currently, when I try to navigate within the solution itself, it is a bit slow in terms of the page load time. When I click on something, it usually takes time to load. When you click on different icons or areas on the website, it is slow. Even when you navigate between different models, it is a bit slow. I would like to see a bit faster performance and a better user experience.

I've been using this solution for more than two and a half years.

I am only an end-user. So, I don't know about its stability and scalability, but in our organization, all the users are using it. We have about 2,000 employees who are using this solution. Everyone has access to the solution across all the regions.

I have not contacted their tech support.

I've used different HR management systems. I might have used Oracle HR, but I am not sure.

It is a SaaS solution. I just need to access the website.

I would, of course, recommend this solution to others. It is a good solution.

I would rate it an eight 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.

In different companies, I have used all of the core features. I have also used it for HR and worked with the recruiting functionality.

The most valuable feature is the ease of reporting.

The implementation could have gone a little smoother. Typically, they give you credits for hours to use, and you go through them quickly. Then, they charge you per hour on calls after that, so I had to negotiate it because I implemented it myself and did not use an outside party.

With respect to technical support, there is some room for improvement.

In the future, I would like to see better artificial intelligence in recruiting capabilities.

I had used Workday for approximately seven years, but I have now left that position.

This is a reliable solution.

I did have an opportunity to scale it. At the first company, there were approximately 2,500 users. In the second one, the number of people using it was closer to 4,000.

The technical support is very good when you get through to the right person.

I have used Workday in two previous roles. At one company, I installed it, and at a second one, I helped to implement it.

The deployment is a little bit complex and I had to purchase additional support hours to complete it. It did not take a long time, although it was also not quick. If you consider what is probably common for most people implementing any type of system that size, I was probably about six weeks late on the deliverable.

I deployed it myself.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis. The pricing is good from an HR perspective, although management gets upset after spending $500,000 a year, every year. As the cost continues, you get a little pushback from finance. It is not a cheap solution.

There is an additional hourly charge for support once you are finished with the credits that are included.

This is definitely a product that I recommend. I still think it's one of the better solutions that you're not paying for customization with. There are better products out there, but you have to customize them. Then, you're paying for increased costs with deliverables. You create a lot of spaghetti strings on customization, then you have to hire consultants to do the work.

I would rate this solution a nine 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 was using Workday at my previous company. The company that I'm currently working for does not use Workday.

We were using it as a people management system to manage people's data.

I found the analysis features to be very useful for our company. I also found the modules installed to be aligned with our company's KPIs. These were the two features that stood out. So, the data part of it was what stood out while using this software.

It was also easy to navigate.

The user interface could be better. Everything else was fine.

I used it for one year.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

They are very good. They're always responsive, and they do provide solutions. I would rate them a five out of five.

Positive

It was straightforward. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of the ease of setup.

It is on a yearly basis.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. I had minimal issues with the software. The issues that I experienced were things that we were able to fix.

Workday is used for a combination of things, such as looking at new opportunities, for example, the company publishes openings that are available to users. It is a place where employee profile content is housed so that other people in the company can be discovered and understand the organizational structure.

The most valuable feature of Workday is the ease of navigation to browse the application. The solution can hold information about the company and people with accounts can be discovered by others in the whole company.

The navigation of Workday is good but could be better.

I have used Workday within the last 12 months.

I use this solution to gather customer requirements and then generate reports, configuring BPs and other HCM related transection like Hiring, termination, job change, Name change etc. 

The most valuable feature is the reporting. HCM prepares reports that describe the performance and other details.

The user interface is good and very easy to use.

The security console should be made less complex. This way, if anybody wants access to a particular business object then they can simply send a request to access the corresponding parts. Once the administrator sees the request, they can set permissions to specify whether the user has access or not.

I would like a report that searches for and produces a list of all the business objects that are based on a function area.

I have been using Workday for 5 years.

I have not had any issues with stability.

We have had some errors in reporting but they were easily solved. 

This is a scalable solution.

I have not been in contact with technical support.

I have experience with database-based ERP systems and this solution is easier to use.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The length of time required to deploy Workday depends on the complexity of the requirements. The average is probably one week.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to first prepare the company so that Workday will best support the organization. You need to integrate it properly into the business. After that is the security configuration, which is the complex part.

Moving to a cloud solution after using an on-premises solution has given me some difficulty because there is a gap. However, the user interface is easier to use.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.