The essential guide to selecting enterprise workforce management software

When evaluating enterprise workforce management software, organizations should assess areas like requirements, compliance capabilities, integration needs, analytics and long-term scalability.

Have you made the decision to switch to an enterprise workforce management software that fully supports how you operate?

A workforce management (WFM) solution is critical to efficiently run your organization, so changing it is no small task.

For global organizations, workforce management presents additional complexity. Supporting employees across multiple countries, languages and time zones requires efforts to balance global consistency with local flexibility. Unique operational requirements and regulatory obligations demand solutions that can adapt to regional needs while maintaining enterprise-wide visibility and control.

With all that in mind, it’s important to carefully evaluate your options.

Use this guide to help you identify how your needs have evolved in the context of the business challenges, regulatory changes and employee expectations you’ve encountered:

  • Examine your operational and employee-focused requirements
  • Understand the implications of implementing a new solution
  • Select a solution that improves performance now and adapts moving forward

The essential guide to selecting enterprise workforce management software

Use this guide to select an enterprise workforce management solution that best meets the needs of your organization.

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Reasons for changing your workforce management software

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Evolving needs

Your needs are no longer what they were a few years ago given the pace of change in regulations and worker demands

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Agile scalability

Your manual processes and homegrown applications don’t enable rapid adaptability, automation or global scale

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Product sunset

You’re being forced to select a new solution because your legacy application provider is sunsetting their current product

Resources for evaluating vendors and solutions

Components of an advanced enterprise workforce management solution

A fully modern workforce management system provides a comprehensive set of capabilities for improving time management, employee experience and operational excellence.

  • Optimizes workforce utilization by matching the right people and skills to demand through intelligent labor planning
  • Reduces manual effort through automated approvals, overtime and no-show alerts, and qualified worker assignment to open shifts
  • Provides labor forecasting and time-tracking technology that aligns company requirements with worker data, such as personal leave, availability hours and skill level
  • Optimizes staffing outcomes while delivering benefits, such as improved safety and flexible scheduling for managers and their teams, integrated into the flow of work
  • Simplifies compliance across multiple countries no matter how unique the pay rules, labor regulations, schedules or policies
  • Allows people to adapt rapidly to changing schedules while meeting federal, state and union compliance requirements
  • Offers predictive analytics and insights to take proactive actions
  • Allows for the monitoring, comparison and assessment of data generated across worker populations, locations and divisions to discover best practices and accelerate adoption
  • Offers global protection against data security breaches
  • Includes multiple co-located global Saas facilities with primary and disaster recovery data centers and data encryption to safeguard information from unauthorized access
  • Goes beyond time and attendance, including overtime distribution, perfect-attendance bonuses, fatigue management and automated alerts that prevent clock-ins with expired certifications 
  • Enables data sharing between the workforce management solution and other business-critical systems, including HCM and ERP platforms 
  • Reliably supports payroll providers, core HR solutions and operations 

How to evaluate artificial intelligence (AI) for workforce management 

As adoption of AI accelerates in workforce management, prioritizing the right Al agents is critical for achieving successful returns. According to Gartner®, Al adoption in WFM is gaining traction as organizations seek to address labor schedule optimization and forecasting accuracy.

When evaluating any Al tool, consider the following:

Time agents

  • Automate entry and approval, and anomaly detection for missed punches or exceptions
  • Reduce manager and employee admin tasks
  • Improve payroll precision and labor cost allocation

Shift agents

  • Automatically identify best workers for open shifts and swaps
  • Optimize schedules for business need, coverage and reduced OT cost
  • Reduce manager effort

Leave agents

  • Evaluate PTO requests with minimal business impact
  • Simplify access to leave entitlements
  • Improve employee experience and compliance

Policy agents

  • Guide practitioners on policy configuration and downstream impact
  • Stay compliant with laws and regulations
  • Provide people the support they’re entitled to

Analytics agents

  • Forecast labor demand, supply and attrition
  • Auto-generate dashboards and insights
  • Enable proactive workforce planning

Technology that doesn’t force you to compromise

Built with a deep understanding of our clients’ technology environments, ADP WorkForce Suite ­is available unified with ADP’s human capital management (HCM) platform and integrates with any other HCM/payroll, so you don’t have to compromise.

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Unified experience with ADP HCM solutions

ADP WorkForce Suite is part of ADP’s HCM ecosystem that’s built to work together. With one login, one interface and one shared navigation across time, pay and HR, ADP WorkForce Suite provides a single source of truth for your workforce data. The result is an easier, smarter and more human experience for managers and their teams everywhere.

 Our unified offering
ADP WorkForce Suite works seamlessly inside the ADP HCM ecosystem for everything you need to manage your workforce.

ADP® Lyric HCM
ADP® Global Payroll
ADP Workforce Now®

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Certified integrations with ERP solutions

ADP WorkForce Suite is designed to work within a large ecosystem of technology partners. You can easily share data between ADP WorkForce Suite and your other business-critical systems, including HCM and ERP platforms, and hundreds of best-of-breed solution providers for payroll, core HR, operations, access control and more.

Our technology partners
ADP WorkForce Suite integrates with leading HCM and ERP systems for an all-in-one solution.

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Work with the leader in enterprise workforce management

Build your business case

Our client value experts will work with you and your key stakeholders to make a data-driven case for change.

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Send us your RFP

If you’re clear about your needs and goals, we look forward to designing a solution that meets all your requirements.

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Frequently asked questions about ADP WorkForce Suite

  • Enterprise workforce management software is a suite of tools that help large organizations manage their workforce more effectively. It combines capabilities such as:
    • Scheduling
    • Time and attendance tracking
    • Labor forecasting and planning
    • Leave and absence management
    • Workforce compliance
    • Workforce analytics and reporting
  • Organizations use enterprise workforce management software to optimize staffing, reduce labor costs, improve productivity, maintain compliance and deliver a better employee experience.
  • ADP WorkForce Suite is built for global organizations that need deep configurability, multi-country compliance and a platform that scales with complex operations. With prebuilt templates for 41 countries, the ability to support operations in more than 100 nations, flexible integration with leading HCM and ERP systems and multiple implementation options, including ADP’s in-house unparalleled delivery, ADP WorkForce Suite gives enterprises the confidence, automation and agility they need to manage today’s workforce complexity.
  • Workforce management requirements gathering is the process of documenting an organization’s business, workforce, compliance and technology needs before selecting or implementing a workforce management solution. It should include scheduling, time and attendance, leave management, labor forecasting, compliance, reporting, integrations, user experience and scalability requirements to help ensure the solution supports both current and future workforce needs.
  • HCM integration is important when selecting workforce management software because it connects workforce data, HR processes and payroll systems. A strong integration helps organizations reduce manual work, improve data accuracy, streamline payroll and compliance processes, gain better workforce insights and deliver a better employee experience.