At SAPPHIRE, the SAP company, SuccessFactors, announced a series of new upgrades as part of its human capital management (HCM) offering. Aiming at businesses that want to go beyond basic human resources (HR) functionality, SuccessFactors also enhanced its talent management tools. Read the rest of this entry »

Workday, Inc., a leading provider of cloud applications for human resources (HR) and finance, unwrapped its latest update, Workday 19. In total, Workday 19 includes more than 170 new features, with approximately 70 coming from the Workday Brainstorm forum. Each Workday upgrade adds more capabilities, and Workday 19 is no different. The Workday press release doesn’t do justice to these new features, but I attended Workday’s analyst briefing and will give more insight into the new features.

Highlights of the Workday 19 release include the following: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the lesser talked about business divisions of Kronos Inc. is Montreal, Canada–based AD OPT, a provider of crew planning optimization solutions for the airline industry, which Kronos acquired in 2004. The company has been in this space for more than 25 years and its core focus is to deliver customized solutions for the tricky task of flight crew planning and scheduling for airlines whose aim is to increase operational efficiency.

Most recently, transavia.com, a Netherlands-based airline with services to leisure destinations as an independent part of the Air France-KLM group, selected the Altitude Rostering Footprint Generator application from Kronos AD OPT. The solution is expected to more fairly distribute work based on pre-defined equalization criteria and creating optimal monthly schedules for cockpit crew members.

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The IBM Connect 2013 Opening General Session peeked into what the future will bring for IBM’s clients and partners. The company will launch a new suite for human resources (HR), and new versions of the IBM Connections social business platform and the Customer Experience Suite.

A series of applications meant to create collaborative work environments (i.e., community builder, video conferencing, activity streams, document sharing, whiteboard collaboration, etc.), will be central to the HR software solution. Read the rest of this entry »

At the NRF BIG Retail Show 2013, a new relationship was announced between Kronos and Manhattan Associates to help retailers profitably integrate their physical stores into their digital selling strategy. The idea is to allow retailers to increase customer satisfaction and drive sales by freeing up trapped inventory in the store and elsewhere in the upstream supply chain, while managing labor costs.

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Human capital management (HCM) software is traditionally understood as addressing human resource (HR) plus talent management business requirements. While HR software is now quite affordable and adopted by many businesses, a comprehensive HCM suite that includes talent management modules is not equally accessible. Talent management products are relatively new on the market. Some of them, especially niche solutions, carry high integration costs, and others are expensive due to the novelty of the technology that they employ.  However, talent management is attractive for almost all businesses regardless of their size, industry, or workforce particularities. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, Vana Workforce introduced Vana HCM Release Update 9, developed on the Force.com platform. Available stand-alone or through integration with salesforce.com, Version 9 includes new human resources and talent management features delivered in the cloud and accessible via mobile devices. Read the rest of this entry »

The software provider to the recruitment and staffing industry, Bullhorn, expanded its offering and portfolio of clients by acquiring the software-as-a-service recruitment and staffing solutions MaxHire Solutions and Sendouts. According to the press release, the combined customer base counts over 5,000 recruitment and staffing agencies. Read the rest of this entry »

Kronos is one of the most important players in the human resources (HR) software market, with a global presence (serving 100+ countries), $820 million (USD) in annual revenue, more than 3,500 employees, and 30+ million users worldwide.

Until recently, the vendor had mostly focused on large enterprises, with its flagship product, the Kronos Workforce Central suite. This changed with the recent acquisition of SaaShr, a software-as-a-service provider specializing in workforce management for small to medium businesses (SMBs).

The solution has been rebranded as Kronos Workforce Ready, and I had the opportunity to learn more about it from Bob DelPonte, product line director for Workforce Ready. Here’s what I found out, along with my commentary on the new solution. Read the rest of this entry »

My recent in-depth report from the KronosWorks 2011 conference entitled KronosWorks 2011: Beyond Time Clocks for Modern Workforce Management asserted that vertically-oriented tuck-in acquisitions were likely in store for Kronos in 2012. Lo and behold, in mid-January 2012, Kronos announced that it has acquired the assets of OptiLink from The Advisory Board Company in an undisclosed cash transaction.

As a result of the acquisition, Kronos has added one of the industry’s leading acuity-based staffing solutions to its health care workforce management (WFM) suite. Kronos now offers possibly the most advanced clinically-focused WFM suite designed to help healthcare organizations deliver high-quality patient care. More than 3,000 hospitals and 4,000 long-term care organizations use Kronos Workforce Central solutions every day. Other notable competitors in the space are API Healthcare, McKesson, and Lawson Software (part of Infor).

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Given our shared presence in the Boston metro area, I’ve had numerous contacts and interactions with Kronos Incorporated in the past, but this fall was my very first attendance of the vendor’s annual user conference: KronosWorks 2010. That attendance was a worthwhile use of my time and a great learning experience about the company and its customers. As some background, here is Ventana Research’s report from the previous conference, KronosWorks 2009.

Kronos is the global leader in workforce management (WFM) solutions that enable organizations to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. Tens of thousands of organizations in 60 countries — including more than half of the Fortune 1000 — use some or all of the following modules of the Kronos Workforce Central suite: time and attendance (T&A), scheduling, absence management, human resources (HR) and payroll, hiring, and labor analytics.

The conference’s official program started with an intriguing animated video with some startling statistics about what our working days and weeks have begun to look like. For example, 15 percent of people admit that they are addicted to e-mail – some confessed to checking their e-mail at the beach, weddings, and even at funerals. 

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I attended ERE Expo online by following the live stream, which by the way was really great, with no interruptions and good sound/video quality. In a way, I’m glad I couldn’t be there in person, since the conference was in Florida, the weather was great and the location was very close to the beach—following online from rainy Montreal allowed me to concentrate better. On the other hand, it seems that the networking was great and people really had fun attending.

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Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with the folks at BIS as part of TEC’s Certification process. For BIS, the value-add of TEC Certification was clear—and all they had to do was complete a detailed questionnaire/request for information (RFI) and demonstrate certain solution-specific features and functions that I outlined for them in a demo script. I sat down for the three-hour session with Kivanç Sahin, from BIS’s Sales and Marketing Department and Dilek Eksi’s, BIS’S Senior Business Analyst. The following are my thoughts about BIS and the ProStaff solution. Read the rest of this entry »

My recent blog series entitled “Integrated Workforce Management (WFM) Platforms: Fact or Fiction?” established that WFM systems have evolved from point solutions (i.e., time and attendance [T&A], workforce scheduling, absence management, human resources [HR], payroll, etc.) into unified solutions with a common user interface (UI), integrated WFM modules, and centralized management. For virtually for every kind of business, the benefits of WFM platforms should come from a holistic view of labor demand, optimized schedules based on specific labor policies and constraints, and the fact that accuracy often matters more than efficiency.

The next evolutionary step in the enterprise applications realm (WFM systems included) is to leverage Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Application (RIA) tools as well as ubiquitous mobile devices and information to bring informed decision-making to the business user. Persona-based UI development is repeatedly cited as a concept and undertaking of late. The aim is to present data that is specifically relevant to the logged-in user, with presentation methods that are rapidly understood.  Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series analyzed the major modules of integrated workforce management (WFM) suites that organizations can deploy to better schedule and assign work in their production and distribution facilities and in retail stores. Concrete examples of commercially available products included those from Kronos and RedPrairie Corporation, given those two vendors’ notable recent moves in the WFM field.

While Part 1 explained the data collection, time and attendance (T&A), activities, and absence management modules of WFM (and their importance), Part 2 focused on the forecasting and scheduling, reporting and analytics, and talent management parts of WFM. The final part of this blog series will analyze the retail sector’s particular WFM requirements and some vendors’ offerings.

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