Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to share some insights on Oracle drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for workforce management. We evaluated Oracle and 12 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on workforce management.

Oracle placed fourth overall in the WFM Value Index. It scored first in Reliability with a near-perfect 98.7 and second in Adaptability for good product configurability. The vendor is one of three vendors with no scores below 80 percent, which demonstrates consistency of focus and results across all the seven categories evaluated.

Oracle’s Workforce Management HCM Cloud provides a strong set of capabilities. Managers can use search-and-match capabilities to find the best resources for a schedule based on skills and availability. Customers can also import published schedules from forecasting and optimization tools in near-real time. Shift planning allows workers to request shift changes and managers to respond to changes by easily finding best-fit replacements. Oracle’s products are mobile responsive so the user experience reflects the device it’s displayed upon. Oracle Cloud Time and Labor has out-of-the-box chatbot time and absence entry and a Gantt chart so managers can easily drag and drop, swap or edit workers’ shifts, all while leveraging embedded analytics to minimize over- and understaffing.

Oracle would have performed better if not for some capability areas related to business technology trends like chatbots, RPA and AI/ML. It also could improve on its scheduling support, mobile device support and management and manager support. Many of these are on Oracle’s roadmap to address in future releases. It also needs to address some of the Usability areas, where it ranked seventh due to lack of depth in collaboration and readily available information on how its product operates across roles.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of workforce management software in the industry. You can learn more about our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool here. Participating vendors can learn more about how to use the Value Index here.