The latest large partnership and implementation of Workday was announced August 13, 2014 by CSC who will establish a consulting practice enabling clients to transition to Workday, and also deploy Workday internally to ~70k employees globally.

The move to launch Workday consulting and implementation practices, often alongside HR BPO capability, has already achieved considerable momentum. Similarly to CSC, vendors that have launched Workday consulting and implementation practices include:

• HP, who in June 2014 announced HP Enterprise Applications Services for Workday
• NGA HR, who in June 2014 was awarded an HRO contract by BMS in North America for payroll and workforce administration that includes implementation of the Workday platform
• Aon Hewitt, who acquired OmniPoint Workday Services in October 2012, having deployed Workday to ~125 clients at the time in 108 countries. Aon Hewitt has several HR BPO clients live on Workday
• IBM, who supported a MPHRO client implementation to Workday going live in February 2014.

Clearly these vendors are responding to a major move to Workday by some major corporations. Examples include:

• HP, over 300k employees in >100 countries
• AstraZeneca, 66k staff in 130 countries
• Sanofi, operations in 100 countries
• Flextronics, 200k workers in 25 countries.

What HCM Components does Workday have?

Workday has vast HCM capability, covering:

• Recruiting
• Benefits and compensation
• Talent management including onboarding, goal setting, career development and succession planning
• Payroll including integration with 3rd party providers
• Other HR services including time tracking, organization management, employee and manager self-service.

In addition to HCM, Workday applications include financial management.

Nonetheless, Workday has stronger functionality in some areas than others and currently needs to develop performance management functionality and enhance its minimal learning functionality.
 
Will Workday continue its momentum?

I believe so, but there are several HCM vendors and HRO providers with their own HCM products for clients to consider including:

• IBM Kenexa
• ADP
• Ceridian
• SAP SucessFactors
• Oracle Taleo and PeopleSoft HCM
• Cognizant Talent-as-a Service.

In addition, Workday pricing is per license agreement whereas HRO vendors commonly use per employee per month pricing.

Nonetheless it is clearly becoming increasingly critical for HRO providers to develop integration capability with HCM vendors including Workday, even if they are not primarily in the HCM consulting business. Major organizations are increasingly standardizing on SaaS platforms such as Workday and SuccessFactors, and integrating BPO services with this framework. For example, in April 2014, as part of Safeguard World International’s 5-year payroll services contract with EasyJet, services scope included integration with Workday.