Written by Mercer's Jessica Cheung, Jess Von Bank and Tara Cooper
Ceridian rebrands as Dayforce
Ceridian recently hosted its analyst update before kicking off their 2023 Insights conference, where the company focused on creating simplicity at scale. The big news coming out of the conference was Ceridian’s move to rebrand as Dayforce. The move to this more simple, modern brand aligns with their vision to make work life better.
Ceridian has been known as a leader in the payroll and compliance arena, but under the Dayforce brand, they will focus more comprehensively on employee engagement and experience through their offer of a single platform powered by a single set of data to deliver better insights and experience. Dayforce has focused their attention on building out more holistic and global HCM capabilities, including HR, benefits, talent, analytics, and workforce management for some of the most complex industries in the world like healthcare and the public sector.
Dayforce recognizes that offering simplicity at scale is completely dependent on good data. That’s why they’re focused on leveraging data as a foundation with three core pillars: a single data model, secure data isolation, and strict data governance. With Dayforce, every customer gets an isolated data set they can run with, enabling a single source of truth for people data.
Dayforce announced the launch of their Dayforce Co-Pilot, an AI-powered assistant that will be interwoven into every product in the Dayforce platform to power a better experience. The Co-Pilot will offer the ability to answer questions and summarize information in a conversational way to get people what they need faster, as well as generate things like job descriptions and reports. Dayforce stressed their commitment to using responsible AI, which includes building technology for social good, maintaining privacy and security as well as transparency, driving inclusion and preventing bias, prioritizing reliability, driving accountability, and offsetting the impacts of creating and using AI for a greener outcome.
Also announced was a plan to support greater global expansion with a commitment to add an additional 31 countries to native payroll in the next few years. And they showcased a number of new features coming out in 2024, including a compliance center aimed at monitoring the legal landscape and providing proactive guidance, industry-specific workforce planning capabilities, autonomous pay that’s designed to remove friction and allow pay to “run on its own” with little intervention from payroll operators, and Talent Community Insights which looks to expand their Career Explorer product to connect employees to peers, mentors and leaders in their company to help advance their career development.
Dayforce is committed to delivering a unified experience backed by a single data model that’s clean, private, and secure. With their focus on leveraging data as a foundation, Dayforce is positioned to offer a single source of truth for people data. We admire their passion for making work life better and believe their mission for a single system built on a single data set is timely, as organizations are looking to consolidate their tech stack and simplify their experience. But we see an opportunity to better leverage customer stories and outcomes to showcase their innovation, as well as the chance to challenge the ways things are done in the talent space. While their acquisition of Ideal put them ahead of the curve for a while, others in the space have quickly caught up on the skills front, so we’d love to see them continue to challenge the status quo and disrupt broken talent processes.
If you’re an HR leader looking for a simplified experience on an all-in-one HCM system, Dayforce should be on your radar. While they’re focused on payroll, workforce management, HR, benefits, talent and analytics for now , you can look to their Solution Exchange to fill any gaps in their offering with pre-vetted, secure technologies that extend the Dayforce capabilities while integrating seamlessly into the Dayforce experience. Just be sure to ask for clarity around what is available today and timing to roadmap items since they are pursuing an aggressive roadmap ahead. You'll want to make sure they can support your needs today while helping you grow and scale to greater capabilities in the future. And as with any vendor, it’s always a good idea to speak to existing clients, especially for newer capabilities like Career Explorer, Global Payroll, HR Service Delivery and their Event-Based Voice of the Employee, to learn about their success, and any challenges they’ve faced in their migration to Dayforce so you can enter the relationship fully prepared for what lies ahead.