Ascentis Overview

Ascentis HR (as well as Ascentis payroll, self service, talent management) is being used across the whole organization. We use it to as personnel files, requesting time off, processing payroll, attaching documents, and helping us go paperless. Our restaurants are scattered throughout two states and no matter where we are we all have access to the same information on our employees.
Customized tabs to track any data that is applicable to your company and be able to create reports from this data. Easily creating any necessary HR report without having to coordinate with IT or a programmer to get them done. Being able to have everyone in the company be able to access the necessary HR and payroll data no matter where they are. The home page has become our communication tool for everything.

Ascentis is being used across the whole organization. Primarily by HR but all managers have MSS access and all employees have ESS access. It has been an excellent solution for managing benefits companywide. We are an international employer so time zone differences as well as geographical challenges drive the need for a global solution.
The organizational structure of Ascentis and segregated nature of the system and system support can be confusing. For example, if I need assistance with onboarding an employee it is not often clear who I should contact for assistance. The company seems to be divided by Ascentis HR, Ascentis Payroll, Ascentis TimeKeeping, and Ascentis Recruiting, It would be nice to have one point of contact for customer support for the entire Ascentis system rather than having multiple points of contact that are often changing. I attending the Ascentis User Conference in 2013 during which we were told that Ascentis HR would be transitioning to a new platform in early 2014. Since that conference, I have received no communication from Ascentis as to the status of the transition and we are still on the Remote Desktop platform. During the User Conference 2013 there was no one from Ascentis that was familiar with the Onboarding side of Ascentis. I got the impression that we were one of very few customers utilizing the onboarding feature and the Ascentis staff was not aware of the features and were unable to answer any questions. In fact, I felt like I was answering their questions rather than them answering mine. Would love to see the system be more flexible for international use. The system does not allow international contact information to be entered and does not allow for selection of any country locations other than US and Canada. We have had to work around these limitations. The Attendance tracking is somewhat limited in that it does not allow for a policy which awards PTO in lump sums at multiple intervals throughout the year. It allows a policy where a flat amount is awarded once a year or where the PTO is accrued on a regular basis only.