Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

Improving worker/manager collaboration becomes a top priority as organizations realize the impact of such collaboration on workforce productivity and profitability. One way to enhance that collaboration is to make tasks such as scheduling, time and attendance and task management accessible through smartphones and tablets. The management team at Dayforce has experience with workforce management applications and now into the next generation of collaboration and mobility. The company uses innovative Web technology to make its workforce management applications easy to use, and is able to demonstrate the value of the monthly and annualized time its approach saves over that of others.

Dayforce’s product suite includes time and attendance, scheduling, labor budgeting, task management and employee self-scheduling. My review of the applications confirms their usability for tasks from calendaring and scheduling to the utilization and budgeting of workers. Dayforce’s graphical interface takes an intuitive approach to scheduling and labor optimization based on worker scheduling constraints. What Dayforce calls performance-based scheduling includes the ability to look at schedules of individuals while seeing analytics of schedule efficiency. A schedule optimizer provides the best scenarios and then automatically populates schedules with a group of details that occur in workers’ shifts.

The suite’s workflow designer can help managers design worker interactions and alerts that can be sent automatically. To help out with the financial aspects of workforce usage, the software lets users look at schedule costing to determine any exceptions that require management review. It also provides ad-hoc reports that are easy for managers for generate for review.

As workforce management evolves to engage workers more with assignments and tasks that affect them, Dayforce has built in methods not just to define tasks but to assign them and approve their completion. This helps organizations gain the most engagement from their workers on a daily basis while also tracking their performance, and it provides a foundation for including rewards that can be made visible to the workers. This might provide an edge for Dayforce, since the software can support a diverse range of types of workers, and incentives and rewards are keys to motivating and retaining talent. Our benchmark research into performance management for talent management shows that aligning the workforce to business goals is of highest importance to 81 percent of organizations. To provide applications in the HR and payroll areas, Dayforce partners with Ceridian, which is also an investor in the company areas.

Dayforce now offers a native application for Apple iOS and Android-based smartphones called Dayforce Mobile, which I reviewed briefly. The application helps associates and managers communicate and work together on scheduling to create a work/life balance. The company should make a demo of it freely available to get more organizations to see its capabilities.

Dayforce competes with workforce management providers such as Infor, Kronos, Red Prairie and Workforce that also are advancing in mobility and collaboration; we believe that such capabilities are critical for organizations to adopt to acquire and retain talent. We are assessing the next generation of workforce management applications now and later on will do a detailed review of vendors and products in this segment to help buyers sort through these and other developments.

If you are looking to replace legacy workforce management systems or the use of email and spreadsheets, we advise you to explore the depth of Dayforce’s applications and look at its success in the market.

Regards,

Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer