And here are my top 3 takeaways from the event
- Ceridian delivers – It is always good to see when vendors deliver. When Ceridian laid down its ambitious product roadmap back at their analyst event in Boston in March of this year – many colleagues (and myself, too) were worried if the company could deliver. To give credit to the product team, they indeed did – there was a lot of innovation – a new user interface, performance management and a document solution to name some key ones.
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| The new Ceridian User Interface (UI) |
- The new user interface is certainly the most impactful. As all new user interfaces (UI) it is built in HTML5 – and with that struggles with information density. This becomes especially noticeable given the extreme richness of the previous Dayforce UI, which was built on Microsoft Silverlight. But Ceridian starts with Employee Self Service (ESS) and there information density it less of a concern. To give Ceridian credit, given Dayforce’s Workforce Management (WFM) roots, the new UI has a calendar and is ready for time entry. These are done well, but it remains to be seen how Ceridian can address more functional richer user interface requirements for Manager Self Service (MSS) and for professional users, like HR managers who work with the Dayforce product day in and day out. It is only fair to note that this is not a Ceridian specific challenge, but an overall HTML5 challenge the enterprise software industry struggles with. My biggest concern around the user interface is that it may not be enough forward looking. Ideally vendors don’t want users to go through user interface revisions more often than every 3-4 years. For that the interface needs to ‘work’ but also have enough elements to not make it look ‘stale’ in a year or so. To be fair to Ceridian, the new user interface paradigm keeps known elements (like the top menu bar), which will help user adoption. Difficult tradeoffs but I’d like to see vendors in general err on the side of future. And Ceridian is not fully done with the user interaction – so will be good to see how the user interface evolves. Finally – the user interface was one of Ceridian’s biggest weak spots as mentioned earlier, so credit goes for addressing this right on.
The Performance Management module is done well and competitive from the start. Multidimensional goals are nicely presented and intuitive to be used. With the existing (and remarkably popular Recruiting) module, Ceridian now has the key Talent Management pieces in play, and a roadmap till 2016 to build out the less important other Talent Management functionalities) (read more here).
The new Documents functionality addresses one of the challenges that HR departments (and enterprises) have – the appropriate storage and sharing of personal employee documents. I’d say a lot of HR professionals are travelling home from Las Vegas with a good solution to a key problem in their department and enterprise.
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| The new Ceridian BI / Dashboarding Product |
- Ceridian does the hard stuff – What became clear to me at the conference is that Ceridian is one of the few vendors that do all the ‘hard’ stuff. And with that I mean Payroll and Workforce Management. These functional areas by themselves are challenging to build, but they get much harder due to ever changing legal and statutory changes. Add labor laws and union contracts to the picture and things are very complex, or hard. With that Ceridian provides a lot of peace of mind to its users, but needs to articulate more how the mastering of the hard topics helps enterprises to become more effective and competitive. Ceridian could answer questions like how a shift composition affects product or service quality and with that customer satisfaction. Or dynamically change shifts based on better customer fit in customer facing teams. Or many of the scenarios I have described earlier here and here on what could be done with the paycheck.
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| The Global Roadmap |
- Global Focus – It is good to see that Ceridian keeps pushing the global aspect of modern HCM solutions, as our research shows, globalization is a trend that only gets stronger. Making sure the people aspect of a globalization strategy is taken care of is key. And while the people aspect always mattes in any strategy execution – it is vital in terms of speed to action for a globalization strategy. Today Ceridian can pay in over 60 countries – beyond the traditional markets in Canada, USA and UK. It is step wise bringing these localizations in the Dayforce user interface, making visibility and access easier. Currently Ceridian has about half a dozen countries visible in Dayforce – moving to a teenage number in 2015.
MyPOV
It is good to see how well Ceridian delivers to the roadmap it has published. It is key in order to overcome traditional Ceridian delivery issues under previous regimes – and to build the trust in the customer base that the rest of the (long) roadmap – till 2016 – will be delivered in time. Enterprise software is the business of trust and vendors earn that by delivering working software at the communicated dates.
Overall I would like to see Ceridian be more aggressive in both messaging / vision and technology strategy. Innovations like the new Documents module are valuable and powerful – but are again more operational (like Payroll and Workforce Management) than strategic, moving the needle for the enterprise using Ceridian. On the technology side the company makes solid, but conservative decisions. I mentioned the new User Interface earlier, the same approach is also seen in the area of Business Intelligence, which is a valuable, but implemented in a traditional (or conservative) technology approach. To be fair – both examples are first steps, a lot can follow and you can rest assured we will be watching closely.
In the meantime the Ceridian product offering is attractive for any enterprise looking for an integrated HCM system comprising HR Core, Payroll, Workforce Management and key Talent Management functionalities. With the addition of ACA needed automation and the existing LifeWorks product and the global capabilities – Ceridian is certainly a vendor to consider in buying decisions.
Also on Ceridian
- First Take - Ceridian INSIGHTS Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 Takeaways - read here
- Progress Report - Ceridian makes a lot of progress - but the road(map) is long - read here
- Ceridian transforming itself and with that the game – read here
And unrelated to Ceridian - but how important payroll can be for HCM innovation:
- Could the paycheck reinvent HCM - yes it can - read here
- And suddenly... payroll matters again - read here
And more on Recruiting
