It's been a long time I have looked at Ceridian - and being part of the vendor's yearly user conference Insights in Orlando was a great opportunity to take a fresh look.
Transformation in Progress
I remember image, perception and user community feel for Ceridian of that as one of a venerable, but dusty payroll vendors. The system worked, but it was one of the grumpy old relatives that you would put in the closet before important people visited. I have spoken to many business and IT professionals who would sheepishly look down and away admitting they are using Ceridian. Not better if using ADP - but then there is a everyone does it glow in their eyes.
Well these times are part of history for the Ceridian, but the company has been transformed under the leadership of David Ossip into a spirited HR vendor that has left the payroll legacy behind and expanded its automation horizon way beyond that. And the changes can be seen in a new vigor and enthusiasm in the partner and client community.
No longer your grandfather and grandmother's Ceridian.
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Dayforce Benefits - Courtesy @rwang0 |
Dayforce is the magic ...
And the change that literally pivoted Ceridian for the better has been the acquisition of Dayforce, which was completed not so long ago in enterprise software terms, on April 2nd 2012. And with that Ceridian not only got a number of seasoned enterprise software executives, but also the modern, Microsoft stack built workforce management product, that originally had a much more narrow scope with Time & Attendance, Labor Scheduling, Labor Forecasting, Labor Budgeting, Task Management and Employee Self-Service modules.
But if you build enterprise software with the right architecture you can put much more on the products shoulders and that's what the team around David Ossip is doing. What impressed me most is, that they have been able to rebuild the Ceridian payroll functionality not only in this short time since the acquisition - but are already moving production customers over to the new Dayforce Payroll engine. There are very few payroll turnarounds on the vendor side in the storied payroll annals, that succeed at all, much less in the short time frame.
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David Ossip on stage courtesy rwang0 |
... and the people, stupid!
And Software also comes back to people - and starting with Ossip, there is now a very seasoned HCM team at work at Ceridian with the former Workbrain (now Infor), and previously Cybershift (now SumTotal) expertise. Turns out workforce management seems to be a good breeding ground for great architectures and smart people (fits another workforce management vendor to watch from north of the border, Visier).
And then there is Larry Dunnivan who built the legendary Cyborg product (now Accero) and former head of Lawson's HCM products. So plenty of R&D and industry expertise. Combine great product with great marketeers like Alan Rottenberg (former Cognos) and you are less surprised about the pivot from HRO vendor to HCM vendor is on the way full steam.
Ceridian uniquenesses
Back when at the Cornerstone conference early June this year, I found some unique attributes in longevity of executive teams, platform, location and product involvement of the CEO. Turns out they were not quite so unique - as the new Ceridian fits the same criteria. Maybe the executive team has worked less together, but it's nucleus comes from Workbrain times. And Toronto and Minneapolis are not your typical enterprise software vendor locations either. And equally Dayforce is built on a single platform and like Cornerstone, Dayforce is not getting tired of mentioning it - and the message does not seem to get tired with customers and prospects either. And Ossip is up to speed on the product - taking live questions on a pretty detailed technical level during his keynote - something we see very seldom in the industry.
Energized customers
And not surprisingly Ceridian customers are upbeat and energized. Fuelled by the successful XOXO customer program and seeing their vendor investing into it's product is certainly a feel good factor - as is a very well organized user conference. Most customers we spoke to are optimistic and look forward of things to come. Surprisingly many have transitioned and moved or are planning to move to Dayforce. Those who have moved are happily realizing the benefits that materialize when moving to a single platform. They are cautiously optimistic on the new road map items coming in the next quarters. Likewise there is optimism from the move me program that helps customers to move off the old Ceridian payroll to the new Dayforce payroll.
Next roadmap steps
On the functional side Ceridian is on the run for completion of their talent management suite. Recruitment seems to be on top of the road map for many vendors with Workday planning on delivering their next updates with this functionality as does Ceridian with Dayforce. Looks like we will see a the winter and spring of recruitment.
And we are excited to see, if we see the same old of recruitment or some new ideas and best practices for the new incarnation of recruitment automation..
As Dayforce has tackled Benefits in the existing product, is already showing customers recruitment, the planned next steps are performance management, compensation and succession management.
Looks like 2014 will see a lot of fully suited up talent management vendors with a complete payrolls for North America and they will be ready to test Oracle and SAP.
Dashboarding
With one common schema comes also the ability to build dash boarding and reporting functionality. And Ceridian has done well here, allowing both the typical transactional reporting with a user friendly report generator centered around HR user friendly topics. And for more advanced usage, it regularly refreshes a data warehouse with key data and calculates corresponding KPIs.
As usual when vendors deliver this functionality, customers are excited about the data they have and didn't know or couldn't analyze about. The anecdote of the conference was one customer who could not believe that there under 25 year old workers beat all other age groups in show up at work performance. Insights lie in the data - they need to be unearthed.
And Ceridian went further with natural language query functionality - opening up ad-hoc analysis for business users. The next step then is to enable storytelling and the product allows to take screen shots to put into Microsoft Powerpoint, the presentation tool of choice.
And lastly - though I did not have a chance to see it - Ceridian says that the user can drill down all the way to the transactional data solving one of the long term quests of software, bridging the OLTP to OLAP abyss.
Advice for partners
Ceridian is moving very fast and if you have software assets, make sure you can fit long term in the ecosystem road map. If you are a services partner look into how you can differentiate, we expect Ceridian to attract more partners outside their traditional payroll and workforce management space, a good opportunity to grow.
Advice for customers
You are in good hands with Ceridian for payroll, benefits and workforce management. If you look beyond, take a measured wait and see approach and see how the new releases are delivering new functionality. We expect Ceridian to deliver quality software on time - but new software is... new software.
If you are a Ceridian payroll customer on a legacy product, we suggest you look actively into migration plans, the new Dayforce based payroll will give you a better overall user experience and sets you up on the future Ceridian platform. Always a good place to be as a customer, on the latest platform.
MyPOV
As mentioned - this is not your grandfathers (or grandmothers - they get forgotten in this saying way too often) Ceridian. The company is on an impressive pace re-building some products and extending in all areas of talent management. This is good for customers and partners, but also for the company which is re-energized compared to a few years ago and is on a promising path to become a full fledged HRMS, talent management and payroll vendor.
Execution is now key and we will take stock soon again.
