Over the last few years, Ceridian has been focused on re-establishing itself as a cloud technology and service provider with its Dayforce HCM platform. Here, I look at the progress the company has made, including a review of current and future Dayforce developments and client successes.

Current Dayforce developments

In all its deals, Dayforce is always the global employee record. Modules include:

• WFM: time and attendance, absence management, scheduling, and labor planning
• Payroll: native payroll, ConnectedPay, and tax
• Benefits: eligibility, open enrollment, and ACA management
• Talent: Team Relate, compensation, onboarding, recruiting, and performance.

Ceridian’s investments in Dayforce are influenced and prioritized by its product idea portal, which allows its customers to submit feature requests that are then voted on by other clients. In recent years, developments have been focused around talent, with its latest enhancements on compensation and learning.

Compensation management allows users to define compensation budgets for base and variable pay and allocate compensation pools to teams. It also includes scenario modeling for managers, total reward statements, has analytics embedded, and provides pay equality drill-downs within each job, including performance and tenure information to identify disparities.

Dayforce learning management has been developed and will be available for clients later this year. The module will allow users to rate courses, and includes machine learning to recommend courses to users, with content provided from a partner. Other features include a personalized training calendar, learning paths, mandated training, publisher content integrations, and audits, reporting, and alerts.

Predictive analytics is another development for this year, focused on improving retention by predicting employee flight risk, ultimately increasing cost savings from reduced turnover.

Dayforce clients

NelsonHall estimates that Ceridian has ~3.3k clients (supporting ~5m employees) on Dayforce, including Rubio’s Coastal Grill and Blue Man Group. Rubio’s was leveraging a paper-based solution for its ~4.5k employees, and was seeking a partner to improve compliance. Rubio’s selected Dayforce because it was a single platform and was intuitive, and it executed a large change management initiative around the adoption of Dayforce. Benefits of Dayforce include reducing its onboarding time from 3 hours to 30 minutes. Rubio’s is currently expanding its relationship with Ceridian and is implementing the performance management module.

Prior to implementing Dayforce, Blue Man Group’s payroll was decentralized and the company was using three different payroll systems. Blue Man Group was seeking a solution that was streamlined, that would improve accuracy, and reduce processing time, with a user-friendly experience. What appealed to Blue Man Group about Dayforce was the unified system experience, flexible configuration, and security features. After implementing Dayforce, payroll run-time was reduced from 12-16 hours to 4 hours. Today, Blue Man Group is leveraging the HR, payroll, tax, scheduling, and benefits modules from Ceridian for its ~525 employees, with the possibility of adding on talent modules in the future.

Future developments

Ceridian shows no signs of slowing down, with future developments focused on succession planning and offboarding, among others. To facilitate implementations, Ceridian launched Dayforce Activate in late 2016, which was geared towards smaller organizations, but Ceridian will be expanding this guided implementation tool to organizations with more than 1.5k employees.

Historically, buyers of Dayforce tend to be North American headquartered mid-market organizations, but over the last 18 months, Ceridian has made headway with many large market organizations with >15k employees and has diversified its vertical markets by gaining traction in the financial services and healthcare sectors.

Long-term plans are to increase its global footprint, which will be facilitated by the Payroll Services Alliance, which extends payroll services to ~80 countries via partnerships with Ascender, Aditro, Seresco, SD Worx, Trianon, Elanor, and FIS Antex.

As Ceridian expands globally and builds its client base further, NelsonHall also expects it to provide benchmarking.

In summary, business focus has been key to enabling Ceridian’s rapid transformation as a cloud technology and service company.