When examining the total licensing and implementation costs of Workday's product versus those of the on-premise ERP vendors, Singh says there was nearly a 30 percent difference in price that favored Workday. (He wouldn't provide a specific dollar amount.) Since SaaS offerings require ongoing payments versus upfront payments for off-the-shelf solutions, Chiquita used a five-year ROI to get to "an apples to apples comparison" base, Singh writes in an e-mail. "Our ROI assumed we would embark on a system upgrade at the end of five years for an off-the-shelf solution--something that is unnecessary for a SaaS solution."
In October 2008, Chiquita went live on Workday HCM with 5,000 U.S.-based employees and 500 managers across 42 countries. Singh took advantage of customization options Workday offered when necessary. But he and his team tried to minimize customization as much as possible, so that they could shorten implementation time lines as they continue phased rollouts to 18,000 Latin America-based employees and nearly 3,000 employees throughout Europe, which are scheduled for 2009 and 2010.
He says Chiquita was surprised that the rigor of integration work in the SaaS world is as difficult as it is in the on-premise world. Chiquita has also experienced challenges in accessing the bandwidth-intensive HR application in remote areas of the world where Chiquita has operations and bandwidth is in short supply and expensive. "The [SaaS] vendor is going to make the assumption that bandwidth is always free, cheap and easy," Singh says.
Today, Chiquita's North American operations enjoy the fruits of the new system, including core HR functions such as employee hiring, job changes, compensation tracking and more. "We can see exactly where in the process the employee is, or how the hiring is going, who is holding it up and why it's being held up, so that we can guarantee when an employee walks through the door, they have an office, a phone, a PC, and they've been given access to all of the systems they need to have access to.
"That's big, when you talk about the number of employees we hire in a given month," Singh continues. "That drops dollars back down to the bottom line."