syncHR vs. Workday Human Capital Management

syncHR is designed for mid to large size companies, typically 200-2000 employees. Any organization that has a strong reporting need and/or a complicated payroll process could benefit from the unique features built into the platform

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

• Automated retroactive change processing and mid-period rate changes – completely automated with no manual intervention needed - If you ever need to give someone a merit increase and make it retroactive or if an employee is entitled to enroll in health benefits on their first day employment but has 30 days to enroll, syncHR will automatically handles these retro changes.
• A single application designed from the ground up that gives equal weight to HR, payroll, and benefit functions - syncHR is designed as a true unified solution with no back-end mainframes or separate front-ends vs backends. Everything is processed real-time in the cloud which has eliminated all discrepancies.
• Customer Service - syncHR provides a designated account manager as your single point of contact. Since the The StaffWell Group is a 24/7 business, I needed a company that was available when I needed them. syncHR delivered with 24/7 emergency support.
• Event-driven employee self service - Other systems we have used rely on employees to make the correct choices as to what is required when completing an employee initiated transaction. With syncHR, the system always directs the employee to the next step reducing both errors and calls to our support staff. I believe this is also the reason why we had a 40% increase in the adoption of ESS.
• Dynamic Security & Workflows - syncHR has no static pages which allows security and workflows to be updated automatically whenever a change is made. This has virtually eliminated the time and effort required from HR to manually update workflows to the correct personnel.

• 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

• Learning Management System- syncHR currently does not offer an LMS system. They only track and report training dates, licenses and certifications.
• Although syncHR is a global solution it is somewhat limited to tracking employee headcount, HR documents, paperless on boarding and benefit information. There is no international payroll option like the one they provide for domestic employees. Although the system can handle multiple languages and currencies, I would like to see a global payroll option.
• Succession Planning - syncHR provides little functionality for succession planning. The system can track budgets vs actuals, goals and ratings but does not offer a true succession planning module

• 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 the system is very easy to navigate but more importantly my employees find it so easy to use. The percentage of employees who now use ESS went up by 40%

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

Whenever we need support our designated account manager is there to provide answers for us. If she doesn't have or know the answer, additional support is provided via a service matter expert in that field. Support hours are 24/7

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

Training was very well done and thorough

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

During the first few weeks of implementation it is important to have all key members participate in meetings. Finance, HR, Payroll and Benefits should be involved from the early stages to ensure that the solution is designed to meet your specific requirements. Since syncHR personalizes their solution for each company a few wrong steps early on regarding the design we wanted caused us to spend extra time later. The more info you provide syncHR upfront the better they can take all of your rules and needs into account from day one. In our case, finance did not get involved right away and therefore some of the items that we needed for our GL needed to be re-done. SyncHR was very accommodating though as they spent extra time with us to update some of the allocations so that finance got what they needed

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

As I mentioned I have used UltiPro, ADP, Ceridian as well as several others and none of them seem to offer half of the functionality and service that syncHR provides. Although we had some problems from time to time, I hold companies in high regard by how they resolve these problems. It's a comfort knowing that my HCM provider truly cares about me and my business so if for no other reason than this, I feel syncHR is far and away the best system I have used. The system works as advertised which is all I could ask for

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

• Due to complexity of our payroll, it would typically take us almost 3 full days to verify hours and perform retro changes before actually running payroll. With so many retroactive changes and manual calculations it was a time consuming and error prone process. With syncHR, the accuracy of payroll has increased tremendously and the amount of time we now spend preparing to process payroll decreased to less than 4 hours per week. All approved time seamlessly moves from the T&A module into payroll and all retro transactions are automatically processed.
• When I initially selected syncHR I was a little hesitant because I never heard of them before and was concerned about their viability as a company and customer service. Several years later I'm happy to say that syncHR has provided better support than any of the better know competitors ever did.
• Although no system is ever perfect, overall syncHR has exceeded most of my expectations. The sales and implementation process was wonderful, the salesperson was responsive and did not oversell what the system could do.
• Training & Implementation - syncHR spent a considerable amount of time learning my business rules in order to build the system to meet my requirements. Training was provided on all aspects of the system until my team felt comfortable enough to handle things on their own. I never felt as though we had a set number of hours of training or that our questions, no matter how redundant or simple were a bother to them.

• 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