Betfair rejects SAP, Oracle and Workday in favour of Fairsail for HR

Article here.

This one has been floating around the UK tech press the last few days, as Betfair is London based.  I must admit, I'm not much of a betting person so was not previously aware of Betfair, but I'm fascinated that a 1700 employee company in 15 countries would have been running SAP, just based on my limited knowledge of other big companies who use the SAP product.

Highlights include this part:

"In total 11 vendors were evaluated, these included a cloud HR solution from Workday, as well as Oracle, but MacDonald felt that these were also "too big for what Betfair needed".
This became more apparent when the company looked at offerings from smaller organisations, such as Fairsail, TribeHR, SumTotal Systems and Aragon-eRH."

Of course I had to go have a nose around Fairsail's website.  Key pieces:

• It's a San Francisco based company.  I found that one interesting, as we're an 8 hour difference from SF here.  I'm curious as to their support model as US west coast can be a challenge for Londoners.
• They use the term 'Glocal' to discuss their global vs. local functionality.  I like it!
• Their user interface has a very clean look.  It has the PeopleSoft functionality of menus up the left side, but reminds me of Workday on the main pages.  It's funny how all HRMS are starting to look the same to me these days.  I guess they're all using usability experts and designing better interfaces from what we've seen 10-20 years ago.
  

Tracking exempt status in Workday

A reader recently sent me a note, asking about how to track Exempt/non-exempt status.  I thought this info might help others, so here it is.

Workday allows you to track exempt status on a job profile, as do most HRMS these days.  A nice thing about Workday, however, is that you can attach different exempt statuses to one job profile based on location:

In previous HR systems that I've seen, you'd be stuck creating new jobcodes, profiles, positions, etc., each time that an exemption status changed, in order to track that status.  Prior to version 11 WD was in a similar situation, so nice to have seen them build out this functionality.

A few things to keep in mind though:

• You need to have your processes locked down tight, as to how you will use this tab.  Will you assume that any state values are exceptions to the country value?  
• Who is pulling any government reports, and where do they come from?  The use case presented on this one is that employees in California may be in the same job as someone in Texas, but due to California legislation, they are non-exempt rather than exempt.  There are a variety of ways to accomplish this reporting....

1. Put the exceptions into WD.  Document that a country is the norm and only exceptions are documented.

2. Don't put the exceptions into WD.  Establish your procedures outside of the system to assume all California jobs of a certain profile (grade level x etc) are non-exempt--in which case put employee work location into your report.

3. You could always put ALL the data into WD...so 49 exempt states and 1 non-exempt.  I'm not endorsing it, but I'm saying it's an option.

There are lots of options here and WD offers a lot of flexibility on this front.  To be successful, you need to ensure that your data entry procedures are watertight and that the reporting folks are working off of them consistently.