8 years later: how global is Workday?

Back in 2012 when I was just starting to learn Workday I wrote a post at the time How global is Workday? and I was especially curious about how they handled a European requirement which wasn't a US requirement. My use case was 'company cars'. 

What did Workday do for company cars in 2012?

 In 2012 Workday had no company car functionality which was a bit of a disappointment as:

1. PeopleSoft had company car functionality.  (Actually, I should use present tense here as PeopleSoft has company car data functionality, if you're an Oracle customer.)

2. The data structure is not complex or intensive.

3. There are government requirements around tracking who gets a company car since an employee is taxed on it. 

There was a brainstorm kicking around the Workday Community which many US multinationals and European customers voted up.

The suggestion from WD consultants at the time was to cannibalize the Business Assets functionality. It was an awkward suggestion to enter data in a consistent manner in fields that were not designed for this purpose. The other suggestion was to build a Custom Object, also not a great idea since there are multiple car data fields needed.

So we're just starting 2021 and nine years later, what's changed?

If you're a UK Payroll customer who only needs to track company cars for UK employees, you're in luck! If you're not a UK Payroll customer or you have cars outside the UK, to use a UK term, 'sod you!'

If you're in the former camp and you're a Workday UK Payroll customer, Workday has delivered the functionality to set up cars, assign them to employees and to run the report to deliver the data to the government for tax purposes.

Well...it's a start and it's better than nothing!

There are some kinks to still be worked out as others have pointed out. It would be nice to have an EIB to load the car data. Also WD has held back on exposing the tables so customers are not able to design custom reports around who has what car and even which employees have cars. I find both of those point to be big limits to gaining value from the data.

 And If you're not a UK Payroll customer you can...

(create your own list of ineffective workarounds here).

In all seriousness, you choose the best ineffective workaround that meets your needs. I've seen companies say:

- Store it in the local payroll systems - Great, that covers the taxation aspect but most companies in Europe operate at least one payroll system per country. Trying to get a report of all employees who have a car for compensation purposes is a lengthy hassle that involves contacting local resources and compiling reports.

- Create a dirty little custom solution, such as a .NET app - Great, but how many .NET apps do I need to create and does HR need to use instead of just using the core HCM?

- Go back to the Excel / local payroll combos we all know and love so well - Back in the early days of HRIS this happened quite a lot. Central HR needed to track X while local HR took care of Y in local payroll. It's not a great solution as it entails double data entry but it's certainly possible and was all the rage in 1983.

I plan to do an update nine years from now and sincerely hope that we're in better place at that time. In the meantime, happy motoring. 

As always, differing opinions fully welcomed in the comments or by email, always open to new ideas and perspectives. :-)

 

A guest post

It's been a while since I've written anything. I have requests from companies who wish to pay me to put content on this site but I will always keep this site as an honest blog. Just my thoughts, opinions and perspective on Workday as someone who is learning things as I go. I always welcome the thoughts, opinions and perspectives of others and I am especially pleased that a guest writer has sent me the following post.

A guest writes...

I’ve been reading this blog since it started. It’s really interesting (and remarkably rare) to see a “warts and all” unbiased account of what it’s like being a Workday customer.

I feel a bit sorry for local UK (or anywhere else) providers - they can deliver peerless products for UK users, but they’ll be ignored by any company that wants a “global” solution. Anecdotally it seems that quite a lot of Workday’s UK business comes, as PeopleSoft’s did, from US multinational organisations who buy primarily in the US and then decide they can use the same solution elsewhere.

I can also see both sides of the “global” argument - Workday has delivered a lot more global (non US) functionality over the years (and with a considerable investment in Dublin recently this is set to continue apace). On the other hand, my reaction when I read the early blog postings and other musings online was “more fool the buyers”. In other words, don’t buy a product and then complain it doesn’t have a certain piece of local market functionality.

If UK (or elsewhere) customers rejected Workday because there wasn’t enough local market content, they (Workday) would have to act.

Businesses are assumed (certainly within UK law as I understand it) to be more “savvy” about the business contracts they sign than ordinary personal consumers - and are therefore expected to do their homework about products and services they buy, so I don’t have a lot of time for them complaining later that something doesn't do what they want - unless they were misled (and I don’t believe Workday does that).

It seems to me buyers balanced missing local content against a global single system (I heard one HR Director say so directly once at HT Tech in Amsterdam).

Personally, I rue the loss of some local colour (note the spelling) in the UK due to “American Cultural Imperialism” - but the blame for this lies in two places - and a considerable amount of it has to go to people in the UK just adopting a lot of idioms, spellings, business pricatises and cliches from the USA without question.

Guest Writer 1 and I welcome your thoughts about this post. If you'd like to see more posts from Guest Writer 1 and others, please leave a comment so that we know. Or if you'd like to write something for this blog, please send it over to: helloworkday@gmail.com

Daylight savings time in Workday

Here in Europe, we adopt daylight savings time a little differently than in the US in the springtime.  Ours only came last weekend, on the 4th Sunday in March, while friends in the US and Canada moved in the 2nd Sunday of March.  Mexico uses the 1st Sunday in April.

A few things about Workday's handling of daylight savings time:

• The clock shifts automatically, a customer isn't needing to do anything.
• Scheduled jobs:  when the Pacific timezone springs forward from 2 to 3 AM, any 2 AM scheduled jobs automatically start at 3 AM.
• Overnight workers:  the system is smart enough to realize that there is a 'missing' hour in the shift, so a worker's calculated hours does not include that 'missing' 2 AM one when the clock jumps forward.
• All of this functionality has a similar counterpart action during the autumn time changes as well.

I compare this to our current, traditional non-cloud PeopleSoft ERP world where a database administrator manually has to reset the server clock and takes the system down as a part of that process.  As we are a global PeopleSoft instance, we have people in the system from the Asian morning through to the South American evening.  Therefore our downtime is very limited--depending on the exact countries, but 9 AM in Singapore is 2 AM in London and 10 PM yesterday in Argentina so it's a rare hour in the day where someone is not online.  It's mainly the hours just after Argentina's workday ends, prior to Asia waking up.  Taking the system down at 2 AM in London to make the time change impacts the Asia daytime.  Granted it's only twice a year, but with the process re-scheduling too.

Many years ago I recall speaking to someone at RBS (The Royal Bank of Scotland) and they had a global PeopleSoft instance which also ran global payroll and due to performance plus business requirements, they were constantly running someone's payroll at some point, had other processes running or had users in the system, except for a brief, weekly half hour allocated as a maintenance window where the system could be taken down.

So overall, I like this Workday functionality; I think it's clever, fit for purpose and gets the job done easily for customers and is miles ahead of the traditional ERP functionality on this front.

More European thoughts on Workday

I mentioned yesterday this interesting blog post related to Workday in Europe.  I think this topic kicks up some passion from those of us in Europe who knew/worked for PeopleSoft.  With many of the same brilliant minds at Workday I think we had very high expectations, especially based on the first looks at the early versions of the software.  While I don't disagree with any of Ahmed's points (well, except for the suggestion that the UK would leave the EU and to be honest, I'm indifferent to the Wheel), his post kicked up a few thoughts in my head which complement his posting.

1. More European functionality is needed

For anyone who's ever worked with PeopleSoft, I think in some ways the international features often appeared to be bolted on after the fact.  Need a new field for France?  Ok, stick it under the French flag.  Oh, same field for Germany...and Spain, wait, no let's put it over here instead.  You only need to look at the Diversity tables in PeopleSoft to understand what I'm talking about.  Why in heaven's name did they come up with multiple tables to cover one little thing...except that it was built after the fact in a clunky manner.

So many of us expected that Workday would take those learnings and be ahead of the game.  I heard someone once say about WD:  it's PeopleSoft but with everything fixed and better.  This is why I struggle quite a bit when WD has *less* functionality than PeopleSoft on the global front.

Basic stuff like car data, contract data, for whatever reason it exists in PeopleSoft but not in Workday.  OK contract data technically exists in Workday but with only a handful of fields while PeopleSoft has 3 pages of fields.  In addition, WD contract data is seen as flawed from a European perspective--it doesn't allow for the tracking of 2 contracts simultaneously, a situation that occurs in Europe.

Further, WD is missing some basic, legally required fields, which is quite a frustration.  (Yes, I realize we can create custom fields, but I'm not sure why they're not there out of the box?)  For example, there is some EU legislation called the European Working Time Directive.  It sets guardrails about the hours an employee can be expected to work.  An EU Directive is then implemented into legislation on a per country basis.  So here in the UK, an employee can opt-out of being controlled by the legislation (so an individual can agree to work more than the 48 hours average cap).  We need an employee to decide if that is the case, and an employee has the ability to change his/her mind later at any time.

Yes, we can control that on a form, or an email or an Excel or a custom field, but having something like this in the HRMS would make the most sense.  Further, if you enabled this via employee self-service, it would be a piece of cake for the HR administration side.  However, Workday does nothing on this front, not even a yes/no box to track it.  I see this mainly on things where the US does not have a similar requirement, then WD is slow to understand the requirement and then to build it.

To put it into another perspective, if I was a European HRMS going into the US market, and let's say I did payroll too, I couldn't walk onto the scene and say, well, I know you have a 72 hour requirement to get a check out to an employee in California, but we don't have that requirement in the UK, so are you sure that you really, really need it?  Hogwash.

I think we see this play out over and over whenever there is a requirement that doesn't exist in the US.

2. The lack of payrolls really is a downer

I realize global payroll can be a bit of a pipe dream.  However, I'd like to outline a scenario that I think is very common and I've heard it from many companies both large and small:

Payroll is king.  If we cannot pay our employees properly, then everything is broken.  Our payroll system also does employee self-service to change tax withholding, address, etc. and it also stores all our training data and...fill in the blanks. There are some pretty nifty payroll products in Europe and many of them are 'payroll systems with HRMS functionality'.

When you come in with a system like WD, sure there are a lot of great advantages such as having one place to get your employee headcounts etc.  But I'm always amazed when people are surprised, that the Euros don't want to use the Workday system.  And really, why should they (beyond higher level management telling them to do so and providing the additional budget for headcount).  If your Belgian payroll system offers that you can change your address and tax code but Workday does less by not covering the tax code part, it's seen as a secondary system.

I realize European payroll can be complex as every country has their own requirements, however, this is such an area of opportunity!  I cannot tell you the number of green screen DOS like applications that I've seen through the years, old faithfuls that print out on dot matrix printers.

In particular, from what I've seen and heard of WD's Absence Management--it's seen in a favorable light from the European perspective, flexible and able to handle the myriad of differing European and company-specific requirements.  I think that is the frustration here, that WD has half of the puzzle solved, but won't take the step forward to create a seamless, integrated one stop shop.

3. An overall lack of global thinking

I realize it's a US company with big US clients, but they are never going to make any gains in say, SAP's backyard with this type of thinking.  It will merely be US multinationals that have offices around the globe who will make up WD's European presence.

For example, fortunately Workday is now delivered in a number of languages for both Employee and Manager self-service.  (No idea about how hard translations are to do as they're still struggling to provide  Malaysian, Greek, and Norwegian only comes in version 24, etc.)  Their newish recruiting product only comes in a handful of languages and the mobile app is only English or French.  Yes I realize you could access via the browser if you wanted Spanish or German, but why release all this great mobile functionality then don't enable it in anything beyond English or French?

Or, I've waxed eloquent plenty of times on the training schedule, but this sort of American mindset often permeates everything that is scheduled.  For some reason, 8 AM doesn't seem to exist in California but all the user groups etc start only at 10 AM Pacific.  I must admit, I found it amusing that the latest Compensation user group meeting has 'Global Compensation Fundamentals' as the top item on the agenda as WD is seeking customer presenters.  The timing is 10 AM Pacific which is ok for US folks but a 7 PM start on the European continent or 3 AM the next day for Australia.  I have bothered to bring this up to WD (when the topic was the global HCM group, another ironic one) as have others with other calls, but the answer is a stock 'it will be recorded, there will be more in your timezone', but there never is.

I think the frustration is that I like others work for global companies or US multinationals where the awkward timing moves around the globe.  It seems like WD puts itself and its California clients in #1 position at all times.  That may not be the true case, but it seems like the perception from this side of the pond.  Back when I worked at PeopleSoft as a consultant I did a 6 week stint between gigs working in customer support.  I had to be in the Pleasanton office by 8 AM to support East coast clients, so not sure what has caused the California-centric approach.

Overall, I continue to think that Workday has a lot to offer and I was rather impressed with some of the advanced reporting that I saw recently in a class (more on that in a different posting), but these were my thoughts on all things European today.

Another European opinion on Workday

I recently had the pleasure of attending 2 more Workday online classes.  They began at 5 PM UK time.  To start with, I had to listen to the instructor kick off the call by asking who we were supporting in the Superbowl.  I didn't give a flying fig about the conversation (as Philly was out).  Instead I was doubly irritated that I could only choose an online course that was either East coast or West coast US timezone and here we are two years after I first started ranting on the topic and Workday STILL doesn't have a proper European presence.  It's fine you have an office in Dublin, but the courses are offered in the US timezone.  In addition, the Superbowl thing was very US centric...I don't even know what to say here.  Often in a foreign county, 'you don't know what you don't know' and I think it applies here.

Either WD wants to be a global player or not...not sure which it is in the moment though.

Another European blogger has a few thoughts about Workday.  I have some further thoughts brewing on this topic, but would recommend that you give this post a look in the meantime.

Pleasantly suprised: Workday's social media response

I occasionally take a break and log into Twitter, to see what is happening in other HR System topics around the world.

Last week, Workday had tweeted about an upcoming online event:

Announcing our 1st tweet chat! Join us on 6/19 from 10-11am PT using #WDAYchat. @LeighLevensaler will discuss Big Data for Better Recruiting

It sounded really interesting, but once again, I wasn't impressed with the lack of global thinking, from Workday.  So I tweeted a polite response to the timing of it.  6 PM on the European mainland, 1 AM Hong Kong next day, it's not great if you are seeking to reach a global audience.  Although fair enough if your focus is the US market.

I wasn't expecting much of a response to be honest (in particular as I'm not tweeting under some big company name, but as an anonymous blogger), but was please to see that Workday's Social Media Director quickly responded to me, in under an hour.

Thx for feedback. We plan to make this a recurring series, so future chats could be at other global times.

We'll also record & post this tweet chat via @Storify for on-demand viewing & to keep the conversation going!

Even though I'm still not impressed that Workday seems so US focused (especially when they could slightly back it up to 8 AM and get into the European workday), I was pleased to get a response.  From a customer perspective, while I'm not happy with the timing I am happy with how they handled my comment.

Implementing Workday: size does matter!

Last week at the Workday Rising conference, one of the most interesting things for me was to hear from other customers:  what functionality they are using, what is their support model, and what is their roll out schedule.  It seems that WD marketing and sales has done a good job of spreading the idea that the software can be rolled out perfectly on a very fast timeline.  Our own CIO was on a call explaining the new 'we're going cloud for all applications' strategy and made the statement:  those business processes, the ones that are taking you 6 months now to design, those will take 6 hours in the new world!  Actually, I'm discovering over time, that's not really the case.

There was an interesting presentation by a small WD customer, 500 employees, industry = wealth management.  They had rolled out HCM plus Financials in 12 weeks, then brought in expense management quickly, and are further augmenting their HCM use.  I compare it to a session on the same day by a large pharmaceutical company of 130k employees who explained their global roll out strategy.  They started with Asia and were going West to Europe and Latin America and finally finishing up with the US.  It was an interesting concept to me, as the bulk of the companies and people that I know start with the US and head East to Europe.

This pharma explained that they were on SAP and their US office was happy with it, so they were going to get the rest of the world on board first, although they did have to do some workarounds, such as putting in some shell records for US managers of employees in the non-US regions, in order to be able to approve goals etc.

They started WD implementation in 2012 have launched Asia countries (including payroll interfaces for some) and are working their way around the globe.

They also made the statement that they were two weeks from launching SAP in the UK and pulled the plug on the project, which sounds quite similar to us, except we were 1 year into a PSoft upgrade.

I mentioned last year, on our US implementation, that the project launch encountered a delay, so that the US launch was in December instead of October.  We're now going through re-sizing efforts on the Wave 2 Europe launch.  Rather than launching Europe for Jan 2015, we're now splitting the group up, with some countries to keep January but others to delay.

This certainly isn't to blame WD as a software application (which is being done internally in my organization as people seemed to think this was a 'magic' software that would fix all of our HR process issues) and they're now seeing the same issues on a new software platform.

It's currently my thinking that especially where you have a large and decentralized environment and you are injecting any sort of standardization or HR Transformation as a part of the mix, implementing WD is the same as implementing a traditional ERP...it's a multi-year effort due to all of the change management and factors outside of the software.  When you're a small company with Excel-based processes or on one Finance, one Expense system, you're able to make that 12 week implementation schedule as you can more readily fit the mold of standardize, change, launch.

Pleasantly surprised

A while back, I mentioned looking at address data.  While we mapped from PeopleSoft to Workday and made decisions to combine fields where we had to, we had a country where WD made the field required, while we would call it optional.  I spoke with our data entry expert in country to confirm it is not used and to confirm that it's not existing in local payroll.  I checked online as well and everything that I found aligned with this data being optional.

I put in a Brainstorm making this request to convert it to optional.  Three weeks later it had hardly any votes, but someone from WD responded to it and asked for the legal source, as their sources said that it was required.  I missed getting a notification at this point that someone had responded, so I did not respond.  However, the same WD employee then responded a few days after, that indeed it should be an optional data element based on new research, and that it was targeted for WD 21 to be updated.

On one hand, I have no idea how they can get to WD21 with no one else noticing this, except that we are not a pharmaceutical company, so maybe our global footprint differs from other big customers.

We had already programmed our conversion logic to stick 'unknown' in the field (no field validation), which was going to look ugly from a self-service standpoint.  Happy to be able to lose that logic and instead leave the field blank.

As a PSoft customer, our management made a strategic decision not to apply patches.  We don't run payroll out of PSoft in Europe, so we can do that.  Occasionally, when something is noticed by the users and it is deemed critical, we will extract that bit of code out of a project, and our developers will manually apply just that bit.  As you can imagine, whenever we would log a case with PSoft customer support, it would be instantly closed as you are not on the latest code line.

I realize this is a quick little fix by WD for something that should not have been wrong in the first place, but quite pleased at how this one has turned out.

Thoughts on Workday training – a few months later & Configurable Security Fundamentals

It’s been a few months since I’ve had time to write here, but time to change that.  :-)

I had put some thoughts together back when I was first taking the Workday training courses, here and here. I’ve since taken a few more courses and am now sending my staff to the HCM Fundamentals course that I took, so a good time for a look back. I’ll start with the courses I’ve taken in the meantime…

The Configurable Security Fundamentals class
This is an ‘online only’ course, like a few of Workday’s offerings which are not offered in a classroom setting. As always, you can find more details about Workday courses here. It’s 10 hours spread over two days, so five hours each day. It explains everything about setting up Workday user security: configuration, security groups, domains, business process security, etc. The agenda was full and the class kept moving.

Sidenote: the format/structure for online courses appears to be the same. You receive a pdf manual a day or two before the course, along with log-in details to *your* tenant, as well as technical details of logging in so that you can test your computer in advance. On course day, you can log in via the pc for both the online course plus voice, or you can log in to view the presentation and dial in separately to the call via phone. I’d say 90-95% of the people used the pc for audio. Overall, there were around 20 or 22 people attending normally.

The structure of the online courses is similar to the classroom training, the instructor walks through a powerpoint, explains the concepts and then you get to work through the exercises in the manual in your tenant.

The good

• no travel costs
• even though it’s online, it’s still a full schedule, similar to what you’d get in a classroom environment. The pricing structure reflects this as well: it’s the same 600 USD per unit, whether it is in-person or online. Sidenote: I noticed that when I took the course in October 2012, it was 8 hours total, they’ve since increased it to 10 hours, so perhaps others found it to be too quick.
• the instructor will stay on an extra 30 min beyond the end of the class on day 1, in case you have questions. As well, this is offered for 30 min before/30 min after on day 2.
• the instructor can log into *your* tenant, so if you have messed up an exercise, they can try and sort you out while people are working on the next one or on a break.

The bad

• there is 30 min at the beginning of day 1 of ‘meet and greet’, similar to if you were in a classroom session. With 20 people saying what their role is, it began to drag a big.
• the instructor has pre-set expectations of how quickly the class should move. Not having the face to face contact perhaps can be an impediment to ‘reading’ if people really understand things.
• In this course, the instructor in addition walked through the exercise before you were unleashed to do the exercise. As an occasional instructor myself, I found that a little odd, to be shown the concepts, an example and then the actual exercise itself, she did it. We then replicated the exact same exercise. So in the back of my head, I wonder if it’s too difficult, the exercises ‘as is’ to be in an online course, as the HCM course I took did not follow this heavy hand-holding.
• scheduling - this one deserves more of a read-out…

I know I start to sound like a broken record here, but Workday’s scheduling is not indicative of a global player. Considering it’s an online course, I would expect a little more flexibility in the offer times, but once again, it’s 9 AM California time or 9 AM New York time, and on a Thurs/Fri rather than other days. For those of us in places around the world, that begins to get old very fast. My security class had a 5 PM start in the UK, so I worked a full day and then got online for another few hours of intense training.

Taking a short look today (Apr 25, 2013), Workday is offering three security sessions in the coming weeks, two in May and one in June. All three of them are on Pacific time, 9 AM-2 PM, although at least on a Mon/Tues or Tues/Wed. Looking at my handy timezone calculator, that looks like the following around the world:

Location	Date	Start	Date	Finish
San Francisco	Thurs Apr 25	9:00 AM	Thurs Apr 25	2:00 PM
London	Thurs Apr 25	5:00 PM	Thurs Apr 25	10:00 PM
Paris	Thurs Apr 25	6:00 PM	Thurs Apr 25	11:00 PM
Singapore	Fri Apr 26	midnight	Fri Apr 26	5:00 AM
Tokyo	Fri Apr 26	1:00 AM	Fri Apr 26	6:00 AM

If you are a US-based company, with only US customers, then that is perfectly fine. But considering that Workday keeps claiming that they are global in nature, I find this to be appalling, in particular when you consider that these are online classes, so they could occasionally put one in a European or Asian timezone, even though that might mean that the instructor is doing odd hours for the two days. For whatever reason, Workday insists on putting everything into the California timezone. OK, timezone rant now over…

Overall though, I’d say the security class was quite good. I’m not sure if you’d need to send your entire team there, or rather, send one person who will bring back the manual. If you have that plus access to a test tenant, you can start to play around with security to understand how it works, while reviewing the manual. In addition, I’d recommend that you check out the Workday Community, a lot of people post questions/issues related to security, and often through reading those, you can get some ideas of pitfalls and how certain setups may make your security maintenance more difficult.

Workday training schedules

As we’re a global company, there are people being trained around the globe…or attempting to be trained anyway. Workday is still a young company, although they claim to offer an HCM product that meets the needs of global companies. However, they have no trainers in Asia and only one for Europe. No really, just one. So what happens when that one is pre-booked for a customer course, etc.? They fly another one over from the US. My Asia colleague requires a few Workday courses, so he’s travelling to Pleasanton, California, along with other US cities, to be able to take them one after another.

That being said, Workday does offer online courses, to avoid the travel. However, they offer them during US timezones, so either Eastern or Pacific time. I’m not especially looking forward to taking an online course that starts at 5 PM Friday my time, however, that is the only option, so therefore it will be done.

Longer term, WD needs to step up the game a little in this regard, or stop claiming to be a global player.

How global is workday?

Working in a large multi-national, being ‘global’ is second nature. It becomes more of a necessity than a nice to have, to have an application that supports a global population. Over the years, we’ve gone in to implement PeopleSoft and bring a group on to our current environment, thus rendering their local HR software obsolete and redundant. That being said, there’s often a flipside, that their local software is very reactive to the local legislation and requirements, and we’ve adjusted (i.e. customized) to address the gaps in psoft (where existing). From my limited viewing and analysis of workday in relation to this topic, a few thoughts:

1. It’s a US-developed application. I’ve often made the same observation about PeopleSoft as well, so no offense is meant. When you look at the functionality from a user perspective, you can see that various pieces do not fit naturally into the flow. In PSoft, I see this most clearly in areas like the contract data pages, or the country specific flag functionality. It seems that a) it was built as an afterthought and b) it was just tacked on, rather than fully integrated into the application. I see a similar train of thought in WD, when you look at it on the surface, you can tell that it was developed for a US user base, or perhaps for US-based requirements first and foremost. That being said, it is a step above PSoft in that some of the European or Asia specific fields (e.g. religion)* are already existing, rather than awkwardly placed under the flag/setid combination.
2. It’s not yet a ‘global’ application. Yes, I realize WD has been implemented in countries around the world. However, in some cases it seems like we’re missing some things. For example, company cars are frequently a benefit in Europe, and one’s HR system often tracks them. PeopleSoft has a few pages to this point–the car is set up, it’s applied to an individual. An individual is attached to a car plan for eligibility. It all ties together at the end of the day and enables you to have the basis of the data required by the UK government P11D reporting. When we asked WD about this, 1) they didn’t understand the requirement 2) they have no car pages, the best you can do is set up a car under the company property pages (where you won’t have the required data fields that you need, such as c02 emissions) 3) no such report is pre-existing in WD (according to the WD supplied resource doing the demo). So now we’ll be stuck, having to make an access database, or something else on the side, to support the business requirement.
3. It will become more global over time. One of the things that impresses me about WD is their frequent application updates. As they get more global customers I suspect they will incorporate more of these business needs into their app, and they will be rolled out accordingly. Much nicer than having to wait for a major/minor release from PSoft.
4. Asia character sets existing and integrated. Our users in Asia will be impressed with the way the Asian character sets are built into the app. We have other HR apps for other purposes (e.g. performance management) that are only existing in English or where you get only the Asian language or only the Western chararcters, that you cannot have both on the same page, but WD appears to have integrated both into their pages.

These are just a few random thoughts from the demos that we have seen, upon first glance and the limited interaction I’ve had with WD resources. It’s certainly not meant as a criticism of WD as from my HR Systems perspective, it’s more global than many apps out there. It may be that a *truly* global HR System that addresses all of the local legal requirements is a holy grail or not worth the effort, especially as you get outside of the US/Canada workspace and many locations use local payroll as a way to meet their HR data requirements. Will halt here, before I wander into the ‘global payroll’ space as that’s a topic in and of itself.

*Sidenote: we had a person from WD doing an online demo. She was skilled at WD, although not used to presenting remotely to a global (i.e. not native English speaking) audience, so she spoke a mile a minute. In addition, she made the statement multiple times, that WD is a global app, and that you can track religion for the UK as an example of its ‘globalness’. What she failed to realize is that here in the UK we don’t track religion, we have the same business requirements as in the US–the company has no business reason to track your religion, in fact it’s none of their business, and in particular you get into diversity/discrimination issues. (In Germany, your HR system should track your religion, but that’s a topic for a separate post.) The point here is that WD’s resource was not clear on basic global requirements and misspoke.