Per Intuit’s most recent Small Business Employment Index, the employment rate is gradually improving. Intuit and LinkedIn have agreed to host the first “Hire Smart” event for small businesses looking to hire their first employees. This free event at Intuit’s HQ in Mountain View, California, is slated for April 27, 2013.

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During the opening keynote address at Ultimate’s annual Connections customer conference in Las Vegas, Ultimate Software announced that it plans to deliver 28 country-specific human capital management (HCM) localizations as well as payroll functionality through its partner Celergo. 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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Intuit recently released its “December Small Business Employment and Revenue Indexes” as well a special 2012 look back report. All data cited in the blog post and year-end report are based on a combination of government data and an anonymized subset of Intuit QuickBooks Online, Intuit Online Payroll, and QuickBooks Online Payroll users.

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RDO Equipment distributes, sells, services, and rents construction and agricultural equipment. The company operates the largest network of John Deere retail stores in the United States, and it also sells Vermeer and Topcon equipment, with customers in more than 60 locations across the US. The company has announced that it is leveraging the UltiPro human capital management (HCM) solution for increased employee engagement, HR operational effectiveness, and strategic workforce analytics and reporting. 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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Part 1 of this blog series described the genesis and current state of affairs of Workday – a novel company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. Part 2 of this series then got under the hood and analyzed Workday’s secret sauce: its object-oriented and in-memory database (IMDB) and definitional services approach, which involves no coding by developers.

The final part of this series will discuss who should be a good fit for Workday and who might not, and why.

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Part 1 of this blog series described the genesis and current state of affairs of Workday – a novel company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and notable PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. For a few years now I’ve been listening to a slew of otherwise hard-to-please analysts and bloggers raving about this software company that has purportedly finally overcome the traditional shortcomings of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems of the 1990s.

One of Workday’s earlier marketing slogans said that it was the first new business management solution to come to market “since the Web turned 2.0, Sarbanes met Oxley, and the world became flat.” In fact, Workday is a younger company than Facebook. The vendor says that its biggest distinguishing factor over traditional ERP platforms is its inherent flexibility, most notably its ability to logically reorganize personnel in a global organization on the fly as required.

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In 2005, after his PeopleSoft venture ended (successfully in financial terms, at least), I was sure that Dave Duffield would not sit still for long. And in fact, I’ve been listening to a slew of otherwise hard-to-please analysts and bloggers raving about Workday for a few years now – this company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri.

Dave Duffield is Workday’s co-CEO, co-founder, and chief customer advocate. As mentioned earlier, he was co-founder, CEO, and chairman at PeopleSoft, and Workday is the fifth company that he has founded (see his full bio here). Aneel Bhusri is Workday’s co-CEO and co-founder (he was vice chairman at PeopleSoft). Aneel was named #15 on the 2011 Forbes Midas list (see his full bio here as well as other Workday leadership bios here).

Indeed, David Dobrin, Naomi Bloom, Ray Wang, Vinnie Mirchandani, Dennis Howlett, Dana Gardner, Nick Carr, Mike Krigsman, Jason Busch, Phil Wainewright, and Brian Sommer are only a few of the renowned market observers that have been talking, blogging, tweeting, and whatnot about Workday as possibly the best invention since sliced bread. Naturally, the skeptic in me has wondered what all this fuss and adulation was about. For some flavor, here are the blog posts on Workday by Dennis Howlett of ZDNet, Nick Carr of the Rough Type blog, and Vinnie Mirchandani of Deal Architect, and these seasoned and discerning fellas are not easily impressed.

I finally had a deeper look at Workday at the recent Dreamforce 2011 conference by salesforce.com (where Workday had a noted presence at the expo floor), and the vendor’s conceptual design and approach is beyond reproach. In many ways, Workday can be viewed as the next generation of good-old PeopleSoft enterprise applications. Like its predecessor, the company started with a set of best-of-breed applications around human capital management (HCM).

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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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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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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 detailed the data collection, time and attendance (T&A), labor activities, and absence management modules of WFM (and their respective importance), Part 2 will focus on the forecasting and scheduling, reporting and analytics, and talent management parts of WFM.

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In her recent blog post 12 Things Retailers Did Last Year To Improve Supply Chain… IDC’s analyst Leslie Hand said that many retailers, as one of the top three priorities of the last year, implemented new “pay and bonus for performance” structures based on current labor standards/time management or simply applied new labor standards to their distribution centers (DCs) and warehouse work. Some also implemented comprehensive workforce management (WFM) products to better schedule and assign work in their distribution facilities and stores.

Sought-after partners most often included Kronos and RedPrairie Corporation, which is not surprising to me given these two vendors’ recent impressive moves in the WFM field. 

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