Top 5 Highlights from the WorkForce Software Vision 2018 User Conference

This year’s WorkForce Software (WFS) user conference, Vision 2018, took place in early May at the Sheraton Grand at Wild Horse Pass in Arizona. The theme of the conference was evolve—over the course of the event, attendees learned about the initiatives WFS is taking to support clients and prospects around the globe through their workforce management digital evolution.

“Together we can accomplish more and evolve faster than we ever can alone.”  —Margie Warrell, guest keynote speaker at Vision 2018, best-selling author, and international speaker.

The conference agenda included sessions by WFS leadership on its product strategy and roadmap, customer success stories, industry round tables, and a session outlining the bottom line impact of streamlining and digitizing workforce management processes.

“The event was informative and energetic! My overall experience with the Workforce team and the software is very good—the product is solid and the team is well-structured and focused on getting the software to work for our needs as we transition from manual processes to automated and more streamlined workflows,” noted a workforce planning manager in the healthcare industry.

Here are the Top 5 highlights from Vision 2018: 

1. Next-Gen Workforce Management

The digital workforce management journey is a bumpy road for most clients, as a workforce planning manager from Walmart’s Health & Wellness Centers explained. “Complacency is disastrous for businesses—companies have to continue to evolve. The road towards change isn’t easy, that’s why it’s important to be able to rely on your solutions provider and technology partners to help solve problems in an efficient and forward-thinking way.”

WFS’s product strategy embraces the approach of partnering with clients and focusing on key industries such as manufacturing, retail, energy and utilities, etc., to build on innovative and vertical-focused differentiators for their solution. In the short term, WFS is driving forward with their cloud solution and is planning to add more mobile features and capabilities.  Data marts and architecting are also part of the plan to help make sense of the ever-growing amount of data points, and WFS is investing heavily in next-gen integration capabilities to support a seamless point-to-point software platforms experience for clients, including integration with third-party time clocks to make time and attendance processes even more efficient.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), the hot topics of the year, remain a sidenote for WFS, but it seems that both users and solution providers still have some ironing out to do with workforce processes and data before everyone can truly benefit from this emerging technology.

2. Xcelerate Implementation Methodology

Over the past year, WFS made big strides on increasing the speed to value for clients and have conducted several studies to demonstrate a positive, more accurate return on investment (ROI). Their Xcelerate methodology is a best-practice, phased approach that leverages the repeatability of standardized workforce policies and software requirements across the globe and across industries. Since introducing this methodology, WFS has reduced its overall implementation time by nearly 50%.
 

By recommending industry best practices and using global and regional standards for workforce policies to build out an “out of the box” (OOB) offering, clients can have a working system much more quickly than they would by customizing the software from the ground up. The next phase in the methodology utilizes pre-packaged vertical and regional extensions to configure the base system to the client’s more unique requirements—on average, the first two phases in this implementation methodology support about 80% of the functionality a client will need from a workforce management system—significantly minimizing the time and costs of “one-off” code-level customizations.

3. Customer First Approach

About 16% of ideas on the product roadmap came from the WFS Ideas Portal—an online portal where clients can enter their feedback on the software and make requests for features and enhancements. Part of WFS’s customer-first approach is to view clients as collaborative partners who play a role in the product roadmap.

 “We don’t want to grow rapidly with ’quick wins.’ We want to grow at the pace of our clients’ successes—developing richer, long-term partnerships with our clients,” commented Morini.

For example, working in the field with agriculture and energy and utilities clients like Dole and Portland GE, WFS unveiled Crew Management—a native Android tablet-based app designed to manage work crews’ time and attendance, and to feed production data back into the core HR system when connected. This resolves a major pain point for clients in industries that have large field crews with no access to the Internet.

4. Compliancy in a Complex Workplace

Labor laws and regulations are complex and often change—as a result, many organizations find it difficult to stay compliant. In fact, the cost of non-compliance continues to increase in many industries. WFS’s software capabilities such as its policy editor are built on its flexible rules-based engine, so users trained on the system can quickly adjust to changes. WFS is also planning additional software features that will automate and streamline policy changes to help organizations stay compliant and avoid hefty fees.

For example, employers are required to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities as part of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Since HR personnel cited that they often receive these types of requests as employees returned from disability leave, WFS embedded ADA policies directly into its Absence Compliance Tracker (ACT) to help HR personnel keep track of and streamline these requests.

5. Tactical Ecosystem Strategy 

WFS announced a go-to-market (GTM) partnership with Oracle at Vision 2018—another strategic move in their quest to expand globally by working with  major HR platform providers. They already have an established reseller partnership with SAP, and continue to work with Workday as well as with numerous global and regional system integrators (SIs). For clients, this tactical approach brings together the competencies and specialties of best-of-breed solutions and providers, resulting in a holistic, high-quality solution to fulfill their workforce management needs.
 

Over the past year, WFS invested heavily in their partner enablement and user training materials and tools to support their growing ecosystem and to minimize the dependency on the WFS team to reap the benefits of its solution.

WFS CEO Mike Morini concluded the event with his own “top 5 list,” highlighting some of the more entertaining moments of the conference. But all jokes aside, WFS continues to make bold, strategic moves led by a seasoned leadership team to ramp up their global presence and market share, and is a strong contender to workforce management software market leader, Kronos.

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