A Story of Adaptation and Success

We’ve been committed to personalizing roles right from the start. For example, one of our original team members began in a remote administrative role and then moved as her skills and interest grew not only into other within the company, but also countries. After a sabbatical, and a move back to her home country, she boomeranged back to us to head up our HR efforts, and now she’s embracing a new role yet again as she grows as a person, and we grow as a company. This one example of a team member’s 8-year journey with us illustrates our dedication to recognizing and nurturing the evolving talents of our team members, adapting roles to fit their growth and aspirations.

I am a firm believer that if you’re in an environment where you’re encouraged to grow your career as you grow as a person, there are massive benefits to both the person and the company. I experienced this myself during my time at UKG. Having started in Canada, I was enabled to grow my experience and skills, move to the US and then ultimately to Australia. If the culture at UKG (Kronos at the time) had not been one that enabled this, I would not have stayed the 10 years that I did. But because I was allowed to grow, learn, and move…I was happy and invested. When your team members are happy and engaged, they bring their best selves to work, significantly contributing to your success. At Simms & Associates, we don’t just fill positions; we meticulously craft roles that respect and amplify individual strengths and passions.

Crafting Roles for Enjoyment and Growth

Imagine working in an environment where your role is tailored around you. Where your job isn’t just a list of responsibilities but a platform for expressing your passions and leveraging your strengths. That’s the environment we strive to nurture. By valuing personal growth alongside professional development, we empower our team not only to meet but exceed their goals, finding satisfaction in every task they undertake.

Building From Strengths

Our dedication to personalization doesn’t stop at creating jobs. We continually adapt and evolve roles to fit the shifting landscapes of our industry and the growth of our team members. For instance, recognizing someone’s technical abilities might lead us to move them into more specialized technical roles. Alternatively, we might identify someone’s talent in social media and have them support cross-departmental initiatives. These examples show how we harness individual strengths to benefit the entire company.

Balancing Personal and Professional Life

We understand the importance of balancing professional aspirations with personal commitments. Our flexible approach to role design allows team members to integrate their work with their life outside the office. This could mean adjusting work hours to accommodate educational pursuits or family needs, ensuring they can thrive both at work and at home.

At Simms & Associates, we are not just adapting to a new way of working; we are actively shaping it. By focusing on the individual—understanding their needs, strengths, and aspirations—we create a workplace where everyone can find their niche and excel. This personal approach isn’t just about being good leaders; it’s about being a good company where everyone feels valued, understood, and integral to our success.

Let’s keep pushing the boundaries of what it means to truly personalize work!

Love,

Amanda

Understanding the Frontline Workforce

The frontline workforce is a diverse and crucial segment of employees. These are the individuals consumers interact with daily at shops, restaurants, hotels, healthcare facilities, call centers, warehouses, and factories. Typically, they are hourly workers with limited direct communication with the head office, HR, or even their direct managers, often relying solely on text messaging.

During the pandemic, this lack of direct communication was starkly highlighted. Companies struggled to contact their frontline employees, underscoring the need for a robust communication platform.

Meta’s Approach and Its Shortcomings

Meta aimed to solve this problem by leveraging Facebook’s world-class functionality. They partnered with well-known implementation partners and garnered dozens of successful case studies. However, despite these efforts, Workplace by Meta, and similar communications-only solutions, failed to address the core issue: true engagement.

The Missing Element: True Engagement

For frontline communication platforms to succeed, engagement is key. Simply offering top-down communications or localized chat is insufficient. Hourly workers are unlikely to download an app just to receive corporate content, especially if there’s no clear benefit to them.

There needs to be a balance, a Yin and Yang, in frontline workforce management, providing tangible benefits to employees.

Essential Features for Effective Frontline Workforce Management

Leading solutions in frontline communications have recognized this and offer comprehensive tools and technologies to build and engage the frontline audience. These features include:

• Learning Tools: To help employees grow and improve performance.
• Task Management Tools: Enabling employees to perform more efficiently and effectively.
• Advanced Wage Solutions: Allowing employees to manage their finances better.
• Shift Pool Technologies: Creating a shift coverage culture by offering open shifts regionally.
• HCM Tools: Providing a unified place for timecards, schedules, PTO, and shift punches.
• Content Fencing Capabilities: Ensuring employees can only see and do things when appropriate.
• Comprehensive Communication Tools: Allowing seamless communication by region, role, banner, etc.

Workplace by Meta lacked these features, which ultimately led to its downfall.

Our Solution: Partnering with WorkJam

I am proud to partner with WorkJam, a frontline workforce management solution that integrates seamlessly within any WFM or HCM technology stack. WorkJam delivers on its promises, offering a suite of features designed to engage, grow, and retain your frontline workforce.

Conclusion: Embrace Comprehensive Workforce Management Solutions

The failure of Workplace by Meta highlights the necessity for comprehensive, feature-rich workforce management solutions. By focusing on engagement and providing tangible benefits to employees, businesses can ensure effective communication and a motivated, well-connected frontline workforce.

If you need to replace Workplace by Meta or any other similar solution, contact Simms & Associates today.

The Serious Benefits of Fun

Work consumes a significant part of our lives, so it makes sense that our work environments should contribute positively to our happiness and health. The Bright HR report highlights that when employees are connected to their roles and experience more positive than negative emotions, they are happier, significantly more productive, and loyal.

Fun in a Remote World

At our company, despite being a fully remote operation, we have embraced the joy of working with enthusiasm. Here are a few ways we integrate fun into our daily routines, proving that distance is no barrier to a vibrant company culture:

• Interactive Virtual Meetings: We keep the energy high in virtual meetings with interactive elements like themed backgrounds or creative icebreakers, turning routine catchups into moments of connection and creativity.
• Remote Team Challenges: From fitness challenges to photo competitions, we engage in friendly contests that spark fun and encourage us to learn more about each other’s lives outside work, strengthening our team bond.
• Spotlight on Success: We celebrate both team and individual achievements openly and joyously. Recognising accomplishments, both personal and professional, in engaging and fun ways boosts morale and motivates everyone to aim high.

The Generational Shift

Today’s workforce, especially Gen Z, expects fun to be an integral part of their employment experience, a stark contrast to previous generations. This demographic shift calls for a reevaluation of how we view job satisfaction and employee engagement. It’s not just about the output; it’s about the emotion and energy behind the work being done.

Leading with Lightness

Introducing fun at work isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach; it’s about understanding what energises your team and integrating these elements into your company’s fabric. This isn’t about constant entertainment—it’s about creating an environment where laughter, positivity, and creativity are part of the everyday experience.

A Call to Action for Leaders

As leaders, our challenge is to inspire and facilitate a culture where fun and productivity flourish together. Ask yourself—what have you done recently to bring a smile to your team’s faces? How are you fostering an environment where people can do great work whilst having a great time? Are you having fun as well?

Let’s build workplaces where fun is woven into the very thread of our professional fabric, creating spaces where people want to be, not just where they have to be.

Love,

Amanda

Accurate Cost Estimation is Essential

Understanding the financial commitment before initiating a new WFM system or upgrading an existing one is vital. Accurate cost estimation is not merely about assigning a price; it enables informed decision-making.

Companies invest heavily in software solutions, and without precise cost estimations, they risk budget overruns and underutilised resources. At Simms & Associates, our pre-sales activities ensure that we provide detailed and accurate cost estimates, allowing clients to allocate resources effectively and avoid unexpected expenses that contribute to software underutilisation.

Read this review from one of our customers

Defining the Project Scope Clearly

Pre-sales discussions are vital for defining the project scope accurately. Early engagement with clients helps us understand their requirements, business goals, and desired features. This clarity ensures that the WFM system aligns with their specific needs and expectations. Businesses often fail to leverage their software because the solutions do not fully address their unique challenges. By clearly defining the project scope, we ensure that solutions deliver the expected value, preventing the software from becoming another underutilised investment.

Identifying and Mitigating Risks Early

A thorough pre-sales process allows us to identify and mitigate potential risks that could derail the project. For instance, overlooking integration with other third-party systems can lead to delays and increased costs, contributing to the software not delivering its full potential. By addressing these risks during the pre-sales phase, we can proactively develop strategies to mitigate them. This proactive risk management ensures the project stays on track and the software delivers the anticipated benefits, enhancing the overall return on investment and reducing for need for change requests at a later stage.

Establishing Defined Timeframes

Defined timeframes are integral to our estimation process. Establishing specific timelines for project milestones during pre-sales ensures that customers clearly understand the expected project duration. This transparency sets realistic expectations and aids in planning for training needs and system adoption. A significant reason why businesses do not fully leverage their software is due to inadequate preparation and unrealistic timelines. By providing clear timeframes, we help clients prepare better, ensuring a smoother implementation process and more effective use of the software and their resources from the outset.

Read this review from one of our customers

Conclusion

The high percentage of businesses not fully leveraging their software investments underscores the critical importance of thorough pre-sales activities and accurate estimations. At Simms & Associates, we prioritise these aspects to ensure our clients receive maximum value from their WFM systems. By focusing on cost estimation, scope clarity, risk mitigation, and defined timeframes, we set the stage for successful software implementations. This approach prevents wasted investments and ensures our clients fully utilise the capabilities of their WFM systems, leading to enhanced operational efficiency and a better return on investment.

For further reading, check out sources such as McKinsey’s report on project management and software utilisation​​ (Workamajig)​​ (TeamStage)​​ (McKinsey & Company)​.

Don’t just take our word on this, see what our customers tell about us.

The Burden of Clerical Tasks

Most of these clerical tasks revolve around communication (or lack thereof) between managers and employees to fix what should be simple issues, whether it’s working to resolve an incorrect schedule or dealing with timecard issues. While many companies may have processes and protocols to help relieve some of the stress associated with these situations, there is a key concept built right into UKG Pro Workforce Management that can streamline these time-consuming tasks: Employee Responsibility.

Personal Experience in Retail Management

Before diving into the solution, I want to share that this problem is something close to my heart. Before I became a Solution Consultant at Simms & Associates, I spent the majority of my career in retail management for liquor store chains in the Midwest. What started as a college job bagging booze and stocking shelves quickly morphed into leadership roles in various store settings. Whether it was college town stops, city stores, or suburban superstores, I gained retail management experience in almost every background. While I loved talking craft beer to customers and selling some of the best liquid Indiana has to offer, I often found myself bogged down in simple issues that had no easy solution.

The Challenge of Missed Punches

One issue in particular still haunts me: employees’ missed punches. I cannot count the number of post-it notes, conversations, or texts from employees with correct punch times for the week, or worse, for a previous pay period where the employee didn’t receive their full expected check. While it’s easy to say employees need to be better if they want to get paid properly, I regret to admit that I was also one of the worst offenders of the missing punch. The truth is that there is not always one driving factor behind these situations.

The Inefficiencies of Traditional Systems

In our company, we had one computer we all shared for clocking in and out, and more often than not around shift change, the computer was taken either by another manager processing invoices, employees trying to print their documents and schedule, or a line of other employees attempting to clock in themselves. When lines of customers build up at the registers, or the cooler shelves look bare and need filling as soon as possible, a simple task like clocking in can go by the wayside. As a manager, you’d think it’d be easy to fix the simple mistake, but more often than not, it can be rather challenging.

For my company, the employee would have to communicate to a manager the punch they missed, who then had to communicate the same information to a higher-up manager to make the correction. If punches from a previous pay period were missed, that manager would have to involve HR. In all cases, physical documentation had to be utilized for any changes, and then that documentation had to be sent to corporate. Throughout my entire career in retail management, I would daydream of ways to end this clerical nightmare.

A Modern Solution: Workforce Management in Retail with UKG Pro

Cut to the present day, where I have been working for some years at Simms & Associates, helping customers in similar shoes to my former self implement UKG Pro Workforce Management to reduce stress for managers and employees across the retail business structure. One consistent piece of advice I have for customers is to put trust and responsibility back to the employees as a way of reducing such clerical headaches for all involved, specifically by allowing employees to edit their own timecards. If you are a retail manager reading this, you may have had a mild heart attack after that last line, but it truly is an incredible feature.

How It Works

The way it works is simple: your employee will still clock in and out of the system as usual, but when they miss a punch, they now have the option to sign in (even on their own device if allowed!) during less busy times during the retail cycle and make the correction. This correction would go to the proper manager for approval, and from there, the manager can accept or decline the changes in one sitting. The system acts as a record, notating that the employee and manager have both signed off on the correction, eliminating the need for physical paper sign-offs. By trusting the employee with this responsibility, it not only alleviates constant and disorganized communication between the employee and managers but also allows the employee to feel more “bought-in” to their role and growth within the company.

Workforce Management in Retail is only one of many ways UKG Pro Workforce Management can help a company grow through employee responsibility. If you’d like to learn more about what the product can do for you and your company, we at Simms & Associates are always ready to talk!

Reality vs. Theory

Unfortunately, the reality does not always live up to the theory. Why not? Because systems do not work in silos – they work as a cog in a larger technology environment. Often when systems are implemented, companies do not allocate adequate resources to documenting the processes related to this changing technology environment.

The Importance of Understanding Current Processes

Every successful system implementation starts with understanding and documenting the current processes and practices. What systems are involved? Who does the work? Are there downstream impacts if something were to change? Are there manual processes being used? Each of these questions, and the hundreds of others that should be asked, are essential knowledge basics moving into the design and build of a technology solution. The more you know at the start, the better and more efficient the new technology solution can be.

Planning for Future Processes

Asking these questions early will also open discussions on how processes will work in the future. What system will be the source of truth for what data? Who will be involved in the new processes? Is change management needed to bed in new practices? Does the new process document all impacts and downstream effects? Will the new system still have some manual processes?

The Reality of Manual Processes

This last question often comes as a surprise to companies. If a company is implementing a technology change to help automate processes, then there shouldn’t be any manual processes – right? In a perfect world, absolutely. In reality, we live in a world where things such as government legislation are written by people who don’t understand the practical implications of what they commit to paper. Lawyers don’t understand that their wording in a contract makes building a technology solution almost impossible. Commissions – in their desire to ensure workers are paid fairly – forget that technology solutions are not elastic bands that can be shaped whichever way to comply. These factors, among many others, mean that there will almost always still be manual processes.

The Crucial Role of Documenting Processes

Which brings us back full circle – why is documenting processes such an important part of a system implementation? Behind every successful system implementation is a plethora of well-thought-out and documented processes that flow across the whole technology environment. These documents take into account the who, what, when, why, and how of the whole environment. Everyone knows what is required of them, and where they fit in. Starting the development of these during the requirements and build phases of an implementation will assist in embedding the new system and understanding what other changes may need to be made to the technology environment as a whole. It will also give the system users time to understand what is being asked of them when the new system is live.

S&A’s Expertise and Advice

S&A are often asked by clients what the main concerns should be when implementing a new system. An almost universal reply is that a company needs to understand how a new system will impact their existing systems and setup, and that they need to invest time and resources into understanding their processes in order for an implementation to be successful. It is a universal fact, however, that there is usually only X budget for implementations, and Y items to be achieved – and process documentation is often in the bucket of items that get left behind.

While S&A can’t always assist with the budget issue, we can supply expert advice and business analysts to assist clients with the documentation of their processes, helping them to understand where they have been, and where they are going. Particularly in the WFM space, it is essential to understand all aspects of the business. Processes may not be the ‘coolest’ part of an implementation, but they are certainly one of the most important.

Contact Us

Implementing a new system can be a complex and challenging process, but you don’t have to do it alone. At S&A, we are here to help you every step of the way. Our team of expert advisors and business analysts can assist you in documenting your processes, understanding your technology environment, and ensuring a successful system implementation.

Don’t let the intricacies of process documentation hold you back. Contact us today to learn more about how we can support your business needs and help you achieve your goals.

Let us be your partner in navigating the path to a seamless and efficient technology implementation. We look forward to working with you!

Why our Culture is our Superpower.

Diversity and inclusion at the heart:

We celebrate diverse backgrounds and perspectives. This richness fosters innovation and creativity and helps us approach problems and opportunities from multiple angles. Every idea gets a voice when everyone feels included, making our strategy and problem-solving capabilities second to none.

Flexibility leads to loyalty:

We were pioneers in adopting a remote-first approach, understanding early on that flexibility would be key to future workplaces. This flexibility has cultivated a deep sense of loyalty and commitment among us all, which shines through in the passion and quality of our work.

Communication as a cornerstone:

Communication isn’t just about sharing ideas; it’s about building connections. Whether through our regular virtual town halls, team catch-ups, or one-to-one meetings, we ensure that everyone stays connected, informed, and engaged, no matter where they are in the world.

Learning and development:

We invest in each person’s growth because we know that our success is built on the continuous development of our team. From workshops to training sessions to just giving time to tinker and explore, we make sure that learning is at the forefront of our daily operations.

The Impact of Culture on Business Success

To some, this may sound like preaching to the choir. However, for those who are still hesitant about fully embracing the importance of company culture, substantial research underscores its impact on business success. Here is some of the evidence that demonstrates why a robust company culture isn’t just a nice-to-have, but a vital component of a blooming business.

• Employee Engagement and Productivity: According to Gallup, companies with highly engaged workforces see significantly higher productivity and profitability Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace.
• Attraction and Retention of Talent: The Harvard Business Review discusses how a strong alignment between company culture and employee values reduces turnover and enhances job satisfaction Harvard Business Review.
• Financial Performance: A Duke University study underscores that over 90% of executives believe improving corporate culture would increase their company’s value and performance.
• Innovation: Forbes highlights that companies promoting a culture of innovation are more competitive, better at problem-solving, and more creative.
• Customer Satisfaction: Companies with a strong, customer-focused culture experience higher customer satisfaction rates. This is a direct reflection of how internal culture impacts external customer interactions and loyalty.

How you can Leverage Culture as Your Competitive Advantage

Understanding the power of a strong company culture can also transform your business landscape. Here’s how you can use your unique culture and values as key differentiators:

• Embed Your Values: Let your values guide business decisions, customer interactions, and internal practices. This consistency builds trust and brand loyalty, making your business stand out.
• Champion Transparency: Openly communicate both your successes and challenges. This transparency nurtures trust and humanises your brand, making it relatable and appealing to current and prospective clients.
• Foster Innovation: Encourage a culture of innovation that permeates every level of your organisation. Make it safe for employees to experiment and take calculated risks. Innovative cultures attract top talent and lead to groundbreaking products and services.
• Customise Experiences: Use your cultural understanding to tailor experiences for your clients. Personalised interactions are often what tilt the scales in a competitive market.

As I look to the future of Simms & Associates, I am committed to continuing to build on this solid foundation. Our goal is not only to maintain our success but, above all, to ensure we have happy team members. This approach guarantees that we lead not only in innovation but also in being a truly great place to work. Our culture is our signature, our statement, and our strategy—all rolled into one. And we’re just getting started.

Love,

Amanda

What is Automated Software Testing?

The typical approach requires a highly skilled expert who is familiar with not only the software but also a company’s pay policies and work rules. This person must define the required test scenarios, document them, and then manually make the required clicks inside the software to execute them while visually verifying the correct results. These experts are usually in high demand within an organisation. Having them manually run tests could be a strain on organisations of any size.

With automated software testing, those test scenarios could be input into a software tool and then run with a single click of a button. The software runs the tests, verifies the expected results. Your experts can then only get involved in the handful of unexpected scenarios that need attention. It simply scales in a way that conventional testing cannot.

Simply put, software automation allows you to leverage the upfront work a company needs to do anyway, in an extremely scalable way. Imagine being able to validate your configuration as producing the expected results with a single click of a mouse button, anytime you want without putting the strain on your most valuable resources.

Result: You’re going to test more frequently, do it at an extremely low cost and save massive amounts of time.

The Difference of Automated Testing with TestAssure

Many companies are struggling with testing. They face delays because they aren’t sure if the payroll systems are working correctly or know for certain that there are errors, but they also don’t have proof that things are working correctly.

Automated testing existed, but it was somewhat rocket science and an art to it. To create your own automated testing solutions, you really needed to be a coding expert, a testing guru; you need to know your system inside and out. And it was expensive and complicated to pull together, and honestly often the companies that tried, failed with it.

We’ve been surprised at how many companies, big and small across all industries, wanted help with testing. For large companies, the main problem is about risk. There’s a very low tolerance for risk, a high cost of error, and avoiding those errors is just very strategic and critical. And for SMBs, the problem is they’re often resource-constrained.

That’s why we’ve partnered with TestAssure.

Test automation with TestAssure frees up time for subject matter experts to focus on other areas during the implementation. TestAssure offers our customers two things:

• A test automation platform, for them to use.
• Testing services to help remove some of that burden.

TestAssure helps in three simple ways:

• Write and run tests faster,
• Resolve defects quicker,
• and ultimately go live sooner.

Customer Case: Home Depot

Home Depot is the world’s largest home retailer. They have approximately five hundred thousand employees across three geographic areas between the US, Canada, and Mexico, with over two thousand stores.

They’ve currently rolled out UKG solutions for timekeeping, attendance, and advanced scheduling.

As part of Home Depot’s overall strategic focus, they had a vision of enhancing the overall employee experience, through mobile applications they have developed, but then also having the power behind the UKG Pro WFM platform to make intelligent decisions around where people were working, how they were working, allowing associates to swap shifts, pay people appropriately, and just make sure that we have people in the right place at the right time, etc. Through the extensive API capability, having the capability to, in turn, build applications that would be able to put in the employees’ hands to make decisions about their lives.

Paying people is everything. One of Home Depot’s core values is being able to take care of people. And ultimately taking care of employees that rely on their pay, to be able to live out their dreams, paying people accurately, scheduling people, and providing them with the visibility around pay, their scheduling is of vital importance.

Currently, where payroll mistakes can lead to legal trouble and unhappy employees, it’s not difficult with an unhappy employee for them to take their frustrations out on social media, that can damage your reputation, damage the contract with your employees, and ultimately lead to legal consequences for your business. So, it’s critical these days to make sure that you’re paying your people correctly.

With a company of this size and scale, everything is complicated. The small issues that you may face, just turn in either magnified, a hundred thousand times when you have a company of this size.

Some of the key things that Home Depot was concerned about were if the technology was scalable enough to accommodate the complex business and payrolls they had, associated with this particular migration, and whether the API layer of the application was going to be sustainable enough to not only support what’s going on today but then what’s also going to be going on in the future.

How Home Depot’s Compliance Concerns Drove the Need for Automated Software Testing

Pay is paramount. And all the things that are changing require constant change within the platform itself, which ultimately requires a fair amount of regression anytime those changes are being made. The time that it takes to go through building out manual test cases and the resourcing necessary to staff and maintain those tests is huge. Therefore, Home Depot had to figure out a way to be able to continue to stay up to pace in meeting all compliance needs and their overall change needs as a company but then being able to shorten the window when it relates back to being able to test to make sure that they can break things in the process. So, test automation had to be a pivotal driver when it came to their overall implementation.

It’s one thing to test the actual change itself, what you think might have changed, but a lot of times those changes have a trickle-down effect and they break something else. So having the ability to retest everything to make sure nothing else broke is pivotal in helping maintain confidence and move quickly.

Why Did Home Depot Involve TestAssure?

When Home Depot started thinking about this overall platform and the amount of change in size and scale needed, one hundred percent manual testing was just truly not an option to be able to complete the program with any sort of time and urgency that would be necessary.

When Home Depot looked at the overall landscape, they could go about building out their own automated test suite. But when you start looking at TestAssure, the expertise the TestAssure team has specifically related to the UKG Dimensions and the UKG partnership, it was just a no-brainer. That gave Home Depot a jump start as it related to all of their regression and all of their testing efforts.

TestAssure partnered with Home Depot’s internal test teams and gave Home Depot support with all of their timekeeping accruals and scheduling. Those are the basis of the system. Home Depot’s overall test case was over thirty-five thousand different automated tests. There were an additional eleven thousand test cases to support custom functionality and custom integrations and scheduling.

Home Depot ran over five hundred thousand test executions during the Go Live. Assuming manually testing takes about fifteen minutes per test case to create an employee, put in the punches, make sure that it passed past. That’s over five years of non-stop testing for a team of ten (!) testers. That scale is just not possible in any other way.

So, concluding from the Home Depot story, automated testing saves time, and it always comes down to peace of mind. Automated testing just allows you to have that security. It allows you to sleep at night knowing that you’ve done your part to ensure that people get their cheques on time in that day.

Automated testing allows you to gain a very thorough level of testing, at the same time and be able to run a lot more frequently which ultimately decreases your defect resolution. It allows you to increase your development and design timelines because it’s going to take less time on the back end for you to be able to complete some of those processes.

Testing occurs after the build and then there’s just a lot of pulls on your subject matter experts at that time, training, change management, maybe issue resolution, trying to figure out the system might not be doing exactly what they expected. Do we need to chase things down with legal? Automated testing allows to focus on those more strategic tasks at a critical time of the project.

How do you make sure you have effective processes to make sure that your test bed remains complete? How do you make sure that you’re making these changes as you’re getting the correct word out from a change management perspective out to the organisation? And how do you minimise the level of change that’s impacting the end-users? Because you don’t want them to be focused on the platforms or the compliance type changes or being worried about whether data’s accurate, their paycheque’s accurate, whatever the case may be. You want them to be focused on the customer because, ultimately, again, if they focus on their customer, the business kind of takes care of itself from that perspective. So, within your organisation, it’s important to make sure that you have the right processes in place and the right partners involved to ensure that we’re able to maintain the same cadence, of speed innovation.

Instead of allowing testing to be a burden for your team, let’s make a plan together to turn testing into your superpower! Contact us to find out more.

Testing in the UKG Ecosystem: A Dual Perspective

As someone who has been both a customer and a partner in the UKG ecosystem, I have lived on both sides of this equation. Testing your UKG solution, early, often and with confident repeatability is critically important. However, it is fairly commonplace for customer project teams to lack a sufficient number of team members that have the time, expertise and technical ability to complete this work manually. Therefore, testing has often been relegated to the back seat where the terms – “We will do what we can” or “Enough to check the box” are used.

The Evolution of Testing: From Burden to Empowerment

Fast-forward to 2024 where testing or having a plan to TEST does not need to carry such a burdensome stigma for you and your organization. At Simms & Associates we believe in empowering our diverse group of talented team members with the best technology to assist our customers. That is why we are betting heavily on TestAssure automated testing. Working with your project team to build smarter, more efficient ways to complete the testing for your project enables your team to provide greater value by focusing on what is being tested and the results – instead of performing the monotonous and unrepeatable manual exercises of entering test data to meet specific criteria over and over and over again.

Turning Testing into Your Superpower

Our team’s goal is help you focus your team’s time and effort where it is most valuable. Eliminate the risks associated with insufficient testing as well as the extra time that manual testing requires. With our Simmsociates as your total implementation partners, our team can guide you through the testing phase and help put your mind at ease leading up to go live.

Not only will we help you create, validate, and execute automated tests, we can give you the safety and security that what you tested weeks ago, is still working correctly today. That is the fantastic power of automated regression testing. Your team will be delivered weekly regression summary reports outlining any areas where tests were unable to run or failed to produce the expected results. This type of repeated testing helps prevent any surprises during your go live.

Instead of allowing testing to be a burden for your team, let’s make a plan together to turn testing into your superpower! Contact us to find out more.

TEST YEAH!!!