Optimum Solutions HRIS (discontinued) vs. Workday Human Capital Management

I would ask myself what data am I looking to house in this system before implementing. It is a very robust system so using Optimum to say only track employee personal information such as address and phone number would be a complete under utilization. I feel Optimum is best used for keeping records on employees, training records, OSHA and workers comp

Incentivized

I would say it's well suited in every environment because I think it does so much. It's like the holy grail of HRIS systems is what I like to call it because thinking about all parts of the employee lifecycle, it lives here in Workday Human Capital Management. So I love the fact that you can do the people data analytics, you can store employee records, the talent acquisition pieces there. I'm thinking I can't think of anything negative right now except for the fact that I can't drill down into the data for the people analytics side. Other than that, I think it's literally, yeah, the holy grail of HRIS systems, I love it and I would highly recommend it.

Incentivized

• The setup of Optimum HRIS was intense as the software comes as a basic shell and everything is personalized to our organization. All earnings codes, leave time, employee types, job codes, taxes, etc. are set up for each company. While this was almost overwhelming at the beginning, we have so much control over the set up and better grasp of the inner workings of the system.
• Tax updates come quickly and are easily applied. This is especially welcome at year end.
• The built-in reporting is robust and offers a lot of options, but the ability to dig in to the database using SQL and Excel allows for very powerful reports that are infinitely personalized.

• Since it is cloud based, it does not have version control issues (e.g. get 10 years behind on versions that are no longer supported), or the need for constant upgrades. This is completed behind the scenes.
• The flexibility of Workday HCM implementation and then taking it to day to day operations was superior. You can then blow and out and start using other system cababilities when ready.
• To enter the system, we must use multi-factor authentication for additional security of employee data. A user downloads their reports and then they are shown in their archive of work transactions and history.

Incentivized

• When exporting reports to Excel I found the formatting to be difficult to work with and having to reformat the reports can be a nightmare. My company's IT department created its own business tools to make the reporting format more user friendly.

Incentivized

• The web interface is awful
• Terrible, terrible, UI. No modern features like auto-save. I can't count the times I have lost work.
• Their UX team (if it even exists) must be aliens, because I can't see how humans would have come up with the UI conventions they have.
• Who creates a website application where you can't open stuff in multiple browser windows and tabs easily?

Incentivized

It is work to make one system the source of truth for our data, but now that it is done, there is less work involved in staying on this path. This means for us that maintaining and/or implementing new modules like performance, finance, talent, etc. is simple. It's a no-brainer

Incentivized

Overall this is a highly useable product. It does require continual use to stay current on changes in the User Interface and functionality, but as noted earlier, this is a reasonable trade-off for the rapid rate of improvement. It is very user friendly and the templated business processes prevents the system from becoming overly complicated

In 2014, Workday has changed the update process. There will be two updates a year; the updates will be delivered to customers typically in a 24 hour window during these two weekends a year. They also keep the Community up-to-date about any planned outages, etc. There is weekly scheduled downtime on Friday night.

From my perspective, the system runs like a well oiled machine and I have not had any issues with customers complaining about speed. If a report is taking long to run, the report can run in the background and you can go about your business. For larger enterprises, there is additional space and machines to process the application in what Workday refers to it as Extended Configuration Tenant

Support is provided by OneSource, the reseller. They really have no expertise and their level of technical expertise is poor. When we went to our training, the room was filled with OneSource people going through the same training. We finished training in 1 day, they took 4 days. They are hardly experts. Workday has come out with two more releases since then and Onesource have doubled in size in the last year – so it’s hard to see how they can keep up.

There is an online community/portal that is pretty good. There is however no easy answer to “guided completion”

Some training is offered online. Cost is per-person. This also gets quite expensive. Training doesn’t follow a logical path A to B. Starts in middle. When you try to do it afterwards at your desk, difficult.
• Training scenarios are not very real

I have done for report writing and mass imports (EIBs). They give materials and you run through examples, i.e. you don’t just watch them do tasks, so that is helpful. Training is expensive – a single reporting writing class is $600 per person for virtual training

We had a small team - 5 of us total. It would have been nice to have a little larger team, but we made it work. Definitely helped that for our first payroll our 3rd party partner OSV was onsight. This minimized issues.

Incentivized

We evaluated some payroll services but found the ongoing cost greater than the initial cost of purchasing our own software and keeping the payroll process in house. Other payroll software was generally more expensive and we are satisfied with Optimum Solutions. I would say the main reason we stayed with Optimum Solutions, converting from their iSeries version to their Windows version, was because of their outstanding staff and support.

Incentivized

The workday human capital management stacks up against ADP due to the overall different features that we have got in a single platform. With Workday HCM, we do not have to select multiple vendors or tools to manage employees, salary details, career progress, etc. Also, the workday human capital management is very easy to use in all the different use cases that I mentioned above.

Workday has released Financials and is continuing to develop it's Human Capital Management footprint with the addition of Workday Recruiting. I think customers will find that is easy to add on additional functionality in the system. Workday does make it easy for customers to make changes without relying on IT resources. The Business Process framework is a visual tool that allows functional resources to make changes and see the flow of the transaction

• Optimum Solutions lets us run all our payrolls seamlessly.
• If we have any questions or problems Optimum Solutions is just a phone call or email away. The Customer Service is the best.
• With the purchase of the Employee Self Service module that will be implemented in January of 2019 we will be able to eliminate the printing, folding, and distribution of check stubs as they will be available through self service. Also W2 information will be available there as well so no re-issuing of lost W2s saving us time and money.

Incentivized

• To get the most value out of all possible automation in Workday you really need to use a lot of their modules, otherwise you may not be able to solve for some pretty important and necessary needs.
• The system maintenance is way more than what I have seen with some other systems and therefore you need a quite large team dedicated to it.
• The ability to automate a lot of administrative tasks and the ability for employee and manager self-service definitely create a lot of opportunity for HR to spent time and effort elsewhere. A lot of the automation that can be leveraged in Workday also allows for eliminating third party vendors as well as the cost of their maintenance and integrations.

Incentivized