systematicHR

I’ve long ignored mid market HRMS – to some of your dismay as many of you have e-mailed to me. Here’s my list of players in no particular order:

• Abra Suite – In here mostly because they are the dominant player in the small market and have captured significant market share in the mid market because of it. They have done a good job expanding functionality.
• ADP Enterprise HRMS – As the leading outsourcer of payroll, they have also captured good market share in the HR applications space. Based on PeopleSoft, but with some additional development, they have a decent core application, but questionable integration once outside of the ADP suite of products.
• Ceridian eSource – As the second in line for outsourced services, Ceridian has a nice HRMS product, but I’ve always questioned their ability to execute their development initiatives.
• Employease – A good vendor that Gartner put in the “leaders’ quadrant of their magic quadrant of mid market HRMS players. A partnership with ADP gives them an incredible marketing arm to grow their market penetration.
• Kronos Workforce Central – Sage software still owns the source code of the HR product. (think Abra on steroids). Kronos owns all development and marketing rights, and I suppose pays Sage some sort of fee. Kronos also has a great marketing arm, but has unerperformed in this space. You’d think that the larges vendor of timekeeping systems would be able to leverage their client base, but I haven’t really seen that so far.
• Lawson Software – Lawson as a good HR system, but perhaps with a higher implementation price tag. It’s probably at the top of the mid market segment, as they are really ERP, but not quite at enterprise HR level. I haven’t looked at the code for the current version ,but they say they’ve gotten rid of the COBOL batch processes.
• Ultimate Software – I’ve never been a fan, but the market seems to discagree. They had a parternship with Ceridian and I’m not sure where that’s at. My main beef with Ultimate is a history of poor development (code base) practices.