Massive Growth in a Short Period of Time while Managing Growing Pains in a Very Positive Way
Four years ago Ceridian was seriously considering keeping its Payroll on the mainframe – two mainframes, US and Canada – building a cloud strategy focused on portal integration and innovations on the front-end – think ADP Vantage/Workforce Now. That would have been the safe route. Instead, Ceridian bet big on the cloud. The acquisition of Dayforce gave it one of the best R&D teams in the business coupled with deep subject matter expertise from Ceridian’s bureau team. The result is a multi-tenant cloud application – a single solution for HR, Payroll, Time, Benefits, Workforce Management, and Talent.
And did that bet pay off! Dayforce HCM has more than 2000 customers – more than 1500 Live, most of which are net new customers (on a side note, Ceridian has no short-term plans to stop supporting its mature products).
One would guess that all of this growth would result in delayed implementations and massive confusion. Instead the opposite has happened; Ceridian has recruited and developed the best in the cloud industry to create a crack implementation team over the past year and as their stats indicated, the number of service tickets has gone down as the number of live customers has gone up. One would expect the opposite; the greater number of live customers, the greater the number of tickets (which is huge testimony to the competence of the implementation team).
Ceridian Walks the Walk and then Shares their Knowledge with Everyone
How does this happen? Well, one thing they should be congratulated for is their massive improvement in employee engagement and satisfaction. The team, headed by Sara Hill (CHRO), has done a wonderful job of getting everyone gelled together – in fact, they were awarded the top 50 most engaged workplaces, and are up for an award for the Leadership500 Awards for their leadership development program. No doubt, this is a key reason for their progress as an engaged team is a successful team. Not only that, the learnings from the Ceridian HR team directly influence the design of the Dayforce software, meaning that their best practices have been built into the design.
CEO David Ossip announced that Ceridian is one of the charter customers for Performance Management. The whole idea is that your company could reap similar rewards if you adopted the Ceridian platform.
Ceridian also learns from its customers. When an enhancement is made to the product, every Dayforce customer will have access to it. The company’s customer success program, known as XOXO, facilitates peer-to-peer interaction to discuss the product and configuration, which results in a significant number of enhancements on top of what Ceridian releases with their three major annual updates.
Start with the Core and Grow
We’ve been tracking the progress of Ceridian, especially Dayforce HCM for a number of years. In every analyst summit since 2012, Ceridian puts up the roadmap slide from the prior year and checks the boxes and every year since, Ceridian has delivered on its promises. Starting with the core, Ceridian has proven that it is arguably the best cloud vendor that can handle compliance. No other major cloud HCM vendor can provide robust payroll, workforce management, benefits, and analytics without partnering. Now Ceridian has added recruiting, performance, and are on track to deliver in late 2015/early 2016 compensation management and career pathing (succession planning, depending on which side of the coin you see) to the Dayforce application. These additions will again be all in one codebase and one database.
Going Global with Ceridian Compliance
Ceridian wants to help you be compliant in all of the countries you operate in and provide you with real time data. This is tricky for almost all vendors because every country has their own specific compliance rules, making it complicated to create an HRIS that works across boundaries and in real time.
So, if you are using your North American HCM provider and want to expand to Europe, you will have to buy a number of systems to manage it vs. Ceridian who has built it all in. Ceridian is currently in 9 countries and will be in 20 by the end of 2015.
This is a huge differentiator for Ceridian since other major cloud providers rely on partners as their only solution. The benefit for Ceridian customers is obvious: working with one vendor for your global payroll needs.
The name of the game is gross-to-net. Ceridian offers customers a one-stop-shop and a single partner to ensure the game is won. From collecting time data to processing payrolls, customers will have one vendor to hold accountable for paying employees accurately, on time and compliantly - everywhere. I expect Ceridian’s global strategy will mimic its North America strategy of taking care of the core compliance-heavy tough stuff and growing into talent management processes.
Ceridian have several customers who have already rolled out workforce management outside of North America, some of which are using Dayforce ConnectedPay to pay their employees. ConnectedPay is an aggregator of payroll data from Ceridian’s in-country partners (Ceridian relies on local payroll processing services outside of North America and UK) that lives in Dayforce and provides visibility into gross-to-net while maintaining a consistent user experience with the Dayforce solution.
In Case You Were Wondering - The Issues with Going Global
There are many legal issues that need to be considered when looking at a global solution. Europe for example has a number of complicated rules (compliance like flex time etc.) meaning that the HCM record needs to be more complicated. Pieces of information like the religion of an employee’s father as an example, is required in Germany. Additional compliance details by country or region requires an engine to run all possibilities; at this point nobody else can do this.
Another area that requires a new way of tracking revolves around making sure payroll budgets remain in line. In Europe, the view of hourly employees is vastly different to that in North America (Contracted hours vs Part-time). In Europe employees sign up for a contract of hours and must be paid even if they don’t work the hours – so if the company cannot track the actual hours worked versus scheduled, they can be overspending on the payroll budget. Dayforce tracks remaining hours for Contracted employees because the time system connects to the scheduling system. This makes everything automated, no required spreadsheets, no need to hope that the employee actually worked the hours that they were scheduled, no overspending on the payroll budget – the time system and scheduling system work as one so all actuals are rectified and auto updates in real time so there are no mistakes.
Acquisition of RelatedMatters
At the summit, Ceridian announced the acquisition of the majority of assets of RelatedMatters. With that, Ceridian gained IP rights to a simple assessment tool – TeamRelate – designed for identifying the relatability of employees to their supervisors, to each other, and to those working on the same project team.
As an example, if a hiring manager were looking at two candidates for a role on a new team, both might have equal skills on paper but one will work (relate) better with the team than the other, resulting a more cohesive and successful team. This software provides the insights that accurately identify the traits of both candidates to help the hiring manager identify the perfect fit.
In another example, a manager’s role is to provide performance feedback to each of their employees, but each employee receives feedback differently – what if the manager was able to determine the best way to deliver feedback for each individual employee? This software identifies the best method for each individual, creating a better performance management experience for all.
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As an added bonus, the acquisition enabled Ceridian to add two senior industry executives (Jon Harris and Ted Malley). This is the first major acquisition for Ceridian since the acquisition of Dayforce, which was finalized in 2012, and signals a serious focus on employee engagement and empowerment.
TeamRelate will be weaved into the fabric of Dayforce HCM over the next several months.
Vertical strategy, new user interface and other developments
The team also shared its vertical strategy, showed enhancements to the UI (which is all HTML5), integration capabilities (most notably self-service). They also discussed the newly released Dayforce Go, the same product as the full-fledged Dayforce but designed for North American companies between 100 and 500 employees in headcount. More expansion is sure to happen as Ceridian has listened to its customers and built integrated versions specific to size or industry right out of the box.
Key Takeaways
Ceridian’s Analyst Summit clearly stated the company’s strategy and how it accomplished its objectives. I can’t speak for everyone, but here is what I took away:
1- Ceridian has been traditionally known as a Payroll company richly based in compliance. They said they will never back down on compliance, but now have a strong focus on making sure Ceridan “Makes Work Life Better”.
2- Ceridian has put customer satisfaction at the top of its priority list by developing their XOXO customer advocacy program (which now has more than 1,000 customers who speak to each other and Ceridian about product best practices and future direction).
3- Dayforce HCM is the best payroll and workforce management solution on the market, especially when it comes to handling compliance on the global scale.
4- The company has made serious inroads into talent management with their innovative new UI for mobile and desktop applications, newer and ever expanding modules like Recruiting, ACA, upcoming Compensation, Career Planning and Succession Planning, and integration with “Related Matters” and much more.
5- Ceridian is committed to innovation, and Dayforce HCM will continue to be one of the top HCM/HRMS solutions on the market if they continue in the direction that they have so far been following.
