Epicor HCM (discontinued) vs. Workday Human Capital Management

I could not recommend this system to anyone. If you do decide to go with this system, depending on organization size, you'll need at least one dedicated IT person with SQL/Report-builder experience to manage the system and reporting, as well as another full-time HR member to manage other administrative set-up and deal with the many, many, user support issues that will crop up. I'm shocked at the number of positive reviews for this product. A couple of them reiterate the same thing such as each of use (which is completely untrue) and many fields/tables for data storage, which leads me to believe that they're from Epicor or Epicor consultants

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

• Timesheets show everything that time has been charged to in a quick glance. There is a lot of information displayed onscreen and is very easy to decipher.
• Employees charge their time on a well-designed front end program, and data is gleaned from that and dispersed into the various timekeeping and expense tracking modules.
• The abilities to charge time to direct, indirect and downtime are all valuable- see where time is being spent and use it as a coaching tool.

Incentivized

• 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

• Compliance is one area that needs further attention. For example in candidate self-service, the admin and managers can see the candidate's demographic information as part of their application, which shouldn't happen. If an internal candidate applies for a job, the hiring manager automatically gets access to that employee's record just like their regular manager.
• On the timesheets module, there are issues with CA specific OT calculation rules on a bi-weekly payroll, where it does not calculate OT for time worked in excess of 5 consecutive days. Also, the application has random (but rare) occurrences where it resets the time zone to the server time zone for users that clock-in/ out.
• Customizations that require professional services contracts can be somewhat difficult in terms of getting resources assigned. When upgrading the system to a new version, the admin has to conduct its own testing, including all and any customizations made to the system and then work with Epicor on resolving any issues.
• Customer Support structure could be better. Currently there is no official filtering of issues and expected response time for different kinds of issues, except for system access. When offering payroll and time keeping, the customer support should reflect reduced time for resolution of issues in these time sensitive areas.
• User training. Epicor HCM offers no free training, aside from webinars on new version releases. While they do offer training sessions, users have to pay for it. From a customer perspective this is difficult to accept. You pay to purchase the system/ module, but if you want to learn how to use it, you have to pay again.

• 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

I just recently lost my job after 16 years, and purposely sought out a position where I could continue to work with HCM. I am now in a similar role to what I was in before, and can continue the same type of work and enhancements that I did at my other company.

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

Where it's good: Epicor HCM at a high level has a straight-forward interface for navigating to the main content sections at either the employee or HR administrator level. The interfaces are consistent throughout the application, and after a brief learning curve, one can navigate through the remainder of the interface pages in any content area without too much difficulty. HCM also has great tools for making sure the analysis of data is available and accessible to non-programmer personnel. Where it struggles: One thing working against the usability of the HCM product is the overuse of the row-selection scheme for all many to many relationships. HCM uses a "select the row from the left frame" and then "enter data corresponding to this row in the right frame" scheme for most of its data entry components. One example of overuse is the employee address entry. During the first setup of an employee or during a candidate's application, HCM allows the user to specify multiple addresses. While this functionality is desired for long-term storage, an option doesn't exist to forgo this interface type for quick initial entry for the primary use case (one address per employee). This is one example, but is particularly visible when a candidate must also bridge the learning curve.

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

The product was always available.

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.

The product performs well. As with any software there are bugs and system enhancements needed, but there are channels in place to let Epicor know what they are so they can add to future versions. Open Enrollment and Salary Planning can be a bit slow at times.

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

The customer support is terrible. When we open cases, it takes weeks to get the development team to have the first look at the case. If development is required, their team commits on a delivery date and up to now—those dates were never respected. They don't do any follow up. Customer service is very bad. When we request an update on the development progress, nobody answers!

Incentivized

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”

We had someone from Epicor come on site to do training, and we "shared" our trainer with another company who was also doing the same major upgrade. It was nice to have another company there so we could ask each other (and the trainer) questions. This allowed for more meaningful discussions during training.

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

As stated earlier, you won't find all of the problems and things that you would like to improve on until you implement. After go-live, you then will have a long period of adjustment as you get the data and processes to work the way that you really want them to.

Incentivized

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

After a failed implementation with Open4, we needed a solution that was more usable with our end-users. The outdated system provided by one of ADP's products needed to be replaced. We chose Epicor HCM because we were enticed by the functionality it provided and ease of use, as well as its ability to be integrated with Epicor ERP, a product which we had owned and used for several years.

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.

Performance is not noticeably impacted by adding more users. Microsoft IIS and SQL are Epicor HCM's underlying technology and have proven reliability. In addition, IS staff are easy to find that know these technologies.

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

• Report deadlines must always be extended as my organization's HR team must manually comb through the data for inaccuracies.
• Reports generated lack integrity. For example, I sent a report to a large donor and the report eliminated nearly 100 employees unbeknownst to my department.
• My organization is still waiting to see the ROI on Epicor. It hasn't been able to meet our basic needs.

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