Workday vs. Oracle HCM

Workday’s adaptive workforce planning tools integrate HR, finance, and operations. This provides HR with a 360-degree view of workforce plans to see how a scenario, such as an anticipated hiring crunch in the company’s industry, will impact each area of the company.

Workforce planning with Workday gives HR leadership insight into the total cost of the workforce — for things like salary, benefits, and reimbursement policies for travel — from a historical perspective. HR management can use this information to build predictive models and identify how to make better use of the company’s human resources.

Using historical data in Workday’s workforce planning tools, companies can decide where to best invest resources — be it recruiting pipelines or hiring campaigns — and how to expedite timelines for hiring budget approval.

Oracle HCM includes workforce modeling tools that draw from native data intelligence tools to anticipate possible hiring and reorganization needs based on potential business situations.

The workforce predictions tool visualizes data and generates insights based on past hiring and employment data. HR executives can predict high performance and future openings, giving the HR team a head start for hiring.

Oracle HCM approaches workforce modeling with companies’ long-term succession planning in mind. As a result, it’s great for companies that have set organizational structure and career pathways because it helps them anticipate employee upward mobility into higher-level positions.

Workday’s approach to compensation strategy emphasizes collaboration and transparency. Administrators and managers can collaborate on a data-informed merits process and configure rules for rewards and other employee incentives to arrive at the most attractive compensation package.

Allowing for collaborative compensation-building takes multiple stakeholder perspectives into account. Plus, setting compensation rules at the outset makes promotion processes more fair and equitable, as Workday’s pay equity dashboard will show. At the same time, the collaborative approach runs the risk of creating more work for all parties involved in compensation structures.

Oracle HCM approaches compensation in a way that caters to high-level management and HR professionals, though in different ways.

Oracle gives access to high-level compensation metrics that interest business executives. Such metrics include base salary, bonuses, and extras to help make the most informed compensation-related decisions. Its budget modeling tool provides an overview of total employee salary and wage spend based on different scenarios.

In Oracle HCM’s administrative portal, HR teams can set up flexible compensation rules that are in line with overall business strategies based on criteria like department and level. A variety of automation features take the guesswork out of compensation decisions. The software system automatically calculates components of each employee’s salary based on where they are located and alerts HR managers to anomalies in salary allocation.

Given these features, Oracle HCM is more rule-based when it comes to compensation tools. Rules and the automations that rely on them are what allow Oracle HCM to save HR professionals time to take on more strategic tasks.

Oracle HCM has an advantage over Workday because it hooks up with employee performance data from the performance management product in the Oracle HCM suite.

Workday emphasizes organization and high-level data analytics in its benefits administration features. The benefits management solutions in its HCM module help HR decision-makers oversee plan offerings, enrollment levels, and their effect on overall business financials. Because all of this information is stored in a centralized location, HR teams reduce their reliance on manual audits and lighten their periodic tax reporting work.

Oracle, on the other hand, emphasizes employee self-service and benefits program customization. It provides a portal for individual employees to sign up for their own benefits while protecting employee privacy and freeing HR pros to complete higher-priority work. Using Oracle, HR teams can provide customized benefits plans and automatically calculate and manage plan rates for each employee group.

Workday’s recruiting tools target adaptability. They pull historical data from performance management tools to pinpoint the most valuable skills and habits of high performers. Recruiters can use this information to continually iterate job descriptions and recruitment strategies to find the best-fit candidates for a changing workforce.

Its recruiting tools also help employers attract a more diversified workforce. It removes bias at every step of the hiring process by masking identifying details on resumes and providing internal and external diversity metrics. This gives companies an idea of where they’re at currently in terms of a diverse workforce and goals to strive for.

However, hiring new employees isn’t always the answer. Workday gives companies tools to identify opportunities for existing employees to advance. For instance, Workday applies machine learning and analytics to help companies understand the skills that current employees already possess in order to better identify skills gaps that inform hiring or training opportunities.

In this way, Workday’s approach to talent management allows companies to incorporate each individual employee into a bigger strategic picture and invest in their development with the company.

Oracle’s recruiting tools encompass the full employee acquisition cycle to help companies hire for vacancies quickly and efficiently. It provides templates and leverages data from past roles to expedite the hiring process.

It also provides candidate recommendations, using AI to match candidates with sought-after skills for a given role. Recruiters can split candidates into pools based on skills and keep them all informed with conversational chatbots or real-time messaging.

Oracle’s talent management tools focus more on automating and simplifying core HR processes to empower employee self-service and take some administrative burdens away from HR staff.

Workday offers native payroll for the U.S., Canada, U.K., and France. However, it also integrates with other payroll software solutions to manage payroll in other countries. HR users can view Workday payroll dashboards by groups and individuals. This makes it easy to ensure standardization across roles and spot any discrepancies that need to be addressed.

Workday’s direct connections with recruiting software automatically transfer employee data to payroll. That way, there’s no delay in payment for the new employee. Payments and compensation changes are managed directly in Workday’s payroll tool, which syncs with data in the compensation tool. Workday’s real-time general ledger visibility flags HR to pay issues before they occur, ensuring continuously compliant payroll.

Oracle’s payroll system includes core features that work in 14 countries, including U.S., Canada, U.K., Mexico, France, Ireland, and several Middle Eastern countries.

Payroll management and compensation tools communicate with each other as well to avoid duplicate work. Payroll administrators can also be assured that payroll is running in a compliant manner, as the system automatically updates based on global, national, and local tax regulation changes.