Organizations Count on Workforce Management Applications to Help Control Labor Costs: Report

Organizations are increasingly turning to workforce management (WFM) applications in a desperate attempt to cut down labor cost and they are becoming fascinated about cloud services too, says the latest report from technology analyst firm Nucleus Research.

Given the report, businesses are looking for cloud service to hand over the task of managing WFM applications as they are more eager to use their IT resource for devising business strategies.

As labor cost is the largest operating expense for any business, organizations are becoming increasingly reliant on workforce management applications. Time and attendance software are used in companies, regardless of the size, just to record the work hours of their employees mainly to pay their salaries.

The WFM value matrix from Nucleus Research for the second half of 2011 focuses on three core areas: workforce scheduling, time and attendance, and leave management. According to the report, leading vendors in this segment are Dayforce, Ceridian, Kronos (News - Alert), and ADP.

“While some vendors have moved significantly on the Technology Value Matrix for Workforce Management, we are seeing steady and promising improvements in both usability and functionality across the board,” said David O'Connell, principal analyst, Nucleus Research.

The Value Matrix can be used by organizations to assess their WFM software investment in existing solutions and evaluate the potential of other vendors that continue to show high and steadily increasing usability and functionality scores over time.

In other news, Nucleus Research announced its Top 10 Technology Predictions for 2012, revealing several interesting trends emerging for the year ahead.

An overall increase in IT spending – a key finding from a recent Nucleus survey – is a common thread driving many of the trends as companies find smarter ways to employ technology to meet business goals. This will translate into tremendous opportunity for technology service providers, the smarter of which should do well on Wall Street in 2012.