Workday 19 released - Greater focus on Financials and Mobile

Workday unvelied release 19 few days back. It is mentioned that the new release comes with 170 odd new features. Here are the main improvements that were noted from the press release given out by Workday:

1. Workday 19 comes with the capability to add custom fields and change labels of fields. This has been projected as a major enhancement in release 19. While I totally understand the need for this from customers, it is surprising that it took 19 releases for Workday to bring this out. From my understanding of Oracle Fusion applications, these capabilities are native to Fusion apps. You can read more here on the various 'composers' of Fusion, which can be used to 'configure' the application to change page field labels, page layout etc. globally or for a targeted population.

2. Workday has traditionally had a 'mobile-first' strategy and the user friendliness of their iPad and iPhone apps are legendary. Continuing with that focus, Workday 19 embraces Android with a workday app available for Android.

3. Workday has stated that it's Financials Suite will be a major area of focus in 2013. True to that, Workday 19 has close to 40 new features delivered for Financials. Another focus I have seen is a push to present HR and Financial data together.

Here is a picture gallery of Workday 19 released by Workday. It is interesting to note that Workday is working on a greenfield recruitment module which is expected to release in early 2014.

Quick notes on Workday's Payroll capabilities

Here are some quick notes from a webcast on Workday Payroll that I attended:

1. Workday Payroll provides country extensions for USA and Canada, at present.
2. For non-US and Canada countries, Workday provides a configurable cloud connector that can be used to integrate with country specific payroll providers.
3. Workday also has local payroll partners like Northgate Arinso, Cloudpay etc. who provide native integration with Workday HCM.
4. The Workday Payroll, HCM and Time Tracking work as an integrated unit rather than being individual silos/modules which are integrated (a plus in comparison to PeopleSoft architecture).
5. The presenter gave a quick demo of Workday Time Tracking (similar to PeopleSoft's Time and Labor) which was released in Workday 17. Except for the advanced mobile time tracking features, I was not floored by what was demonstrated. In terms of the depth of time tracking functionalities, I believe PeopleSoft would be very much up there.
6. The product seemed to be designed around the business process of executing and administering a payroll, rather than around running a payroll engine, which is a real positive. There are a number of audits, alerts, reports and drill down charts that are provided as part of the product and most of these are executed automatically as each phase of the payroll cycle completes.
7. A lot of calculations, especially around time rules and absence balances seemed to be real time, rather than depending on a process to be run. It was pretty interesting to see the calculated payable time being displayed immediately on saving the timesheet! I should mention here that generation of payable time on submitting the timesheet is a feature that has been announced in PeopleSoft v9.2.
8. The presenter mentioned that the largest Workday Payroll customer has a headcount of 40,000 employees and that half of Workday's 400+ customers use Workday Payroll.

I do not want to delve into comparing the Workday solution with that of PeopleSoft - a one hour session is too short to make any meaningful conclusion. But, it seemed to me that usability, analytics, ease of payroll processing and a business process oriented approach are obvious plus points of Workday payroll (this is to be expected given the generational difference in technology used in the two products!). Given the tools provided and the process oriented design of the module, payroll processing should be faster and less error prone in Workday payroll in comparison to PeopleSoft. But, for Time and Attendance and Payroll processes, depth of functionality and configurability matter more than great usability. It is also obvious that payroll is not the focus area for Workday as they offer country extensions for just USA and Canada (already Oracle Fusion provides payroll extensions for more countries, including China, UK and Saudi Arabia) and have a partnership model as their global payroll strategy.
Considering the relative lack of focus of Workday Payroll outside USA/Canada, risks and effort involved in a typical payroll migration project and the proven capabilities of PeopleSoft Global Payroll, makes Workday payroll less of a direct threat to the installed base of PeopleSoft Global Payroll in the short term. Here is where I think that the co-existence model offered by Oracle Fusion is better suited to help PeopleSoft Global Payroll customers transition to a SaaS based solution (Fusion) for core HCM and Talent Management while utilising the HR2HR integration to retain PeopleSoft Global Payroll. This option gives customers the time to phase out their HR and Payroll system transformation roadmap with lesser disruptions.

Update on 17/01/2013: There is an interesting discussion in the Workday HCM group in LinkedIn on Workday payroll and comments from customers who are already live on the product.
You can follow it here.

And here are some screenshots depicting Workday's Global Payroll model and partners:

Payroll partners of Workday with integration to Workday HCM/Time Tracking:

Workday unveils Time Tracking module in Workday 17

Workday has announced the introduction of a time tracking module in the Workday 17 release. This complements their existing Workday Absence Management and Workday Payroll solutions, to provide customers with an integrated Time and Attendance system.
This is indeed stepping up the competition in the SaaS HCM space (and ofcourse more death nails to on-premise Time and Attendance deployments!) and \I will closely watch the next move from Oracle as Fusion HCM does not have a Time and Labor solution. Bring them on, I say!
More details of Workday 17 can be read here.

Onboarding and Exit Processes: A glaring gap in PeopleSoft HCM

Onboarding and Exit processes in an organisation are typically resource intensive, requires coordination between multiple departments, are workflow and checklist based and extremely critical for a positive employee experience. It goes without saying that there is great benefit in automating both onboarding and exit processes and integrating it with the core HCM ERP application. In this regard, it has been extremely surprising for me that PeopleSoft HCM does not deliver a framework that can be used for onboarding employees and managing the exit processes. It pains to see customers resorting to manual onboarding processes even after investing millions in implementing PeopleSoft HCM or building a custom onboarding/exit framework. SMARTERP is one company that has tried to address this deficiency in the PeopleSoft market by developing a bolt-on onboarding framework. You can find details of the product here.

This brings me to Workday. In the latest release of Workday (Workday 16), they have delivered an out of the box onboarding framework. You can read up more on this on Amy Wilson's blog here. All customers of workday can use the new onboarding framework which looks pretty cool from few of the screenshots I have seen. My thumps up to the Workday product development team for addressing a business process that benefits greatly from automation.

The real game changer with SaaS vendors in my mind is the pace at which they 'push out' significant features to customers at no extra cost. Oracle trumpeted the 'Feature Pack' concept few years back as a similar concept - more frequent releases with major functionality improvements. Unfortunately, the definition of both 'frequent' and 'major functionality improvements' differ between a SaaS vendor like Workday and an on-premise vendor like Oracle. The feature packs are released once in a year (compared to 3 to 4 major releases in a year for Workday) and I have not seen any significant functionality changes in any of the feature packs that have been released till now for PeopleSoft HCM. But, this is a topic for another blog post!

Coming back to our original discussion - I sincerely hope that Oracle PeopleSoft HCM Product managers take note of this impending market need for an onboarding and exit framework and introduce this at the latest release possible (That would possibly be 9.3 or some feature packs of 9.2 after it's released in 2013). 

Gartner identifies App Stores as one of the strategic technologies for 2012

An enterprise App Store for PeopleSoft is a topic I have discussed many times in this blog before. The hidden potential of that idea hit me again when I was reading the list of strategic technologies for 2012 published by Gartner. You can read the complete list here. An excerpt from the report is given below:
"Gartner forecasts that by 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year. This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus. With enterprise app stores, the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support entrepreneurs"
With mobile/tablet based applications becoming ubiquitous, there is no doubt in my mind that the timing is just right for an App Store dedicated to PeopleSoft applications. Considering the strong partnership Workday has with Salesforce.com, it would not be a surprise if a Workday App Store is launched soon.