Cezanne OnDemand review by Inspector Jones

Cezanne OnDemand is a high-quality, comprehensive HR solution for mid-market organisations. We think it’s a strong choice, and stacks up well against the competition.

Cezanne On Demand is a fully-featured HR suite. It includes a broad set of functionality, which we think is one of the best in the market:

• People and organisation administration, to manage employee records, career/employment information, disciplinary events, health and safety, salary, benefits and organisation structure
• Self-service for employees and managers, with personalised dashboards, task lists and alerts
• Performance, training and development functionality, which we think includes a powerful set of features, and is rapidly improving
• Absence management, which can handle automatic calculations for different regions, automatic workflow, and sends an email with a calendar invite whenever absence is booked
• Workspaces - a place for social engagement with staff, to post announcements, share documents, and link to important information. This is nice to have if you don't already use a collaboration/intranet tool, or if you're looking for an HR-specific one.

Cezanne OnDemand provides solid absence management functionality, with staff leave calendars

Before you choose Cezanne OnDemand, here are the key things you need to know.

First, simplicity. In our review, we’ve found Cezanne OnDemand easy to understand, and intuitive. The menu system, level of detail, and visual presentation all work well. The system is designed to run with no customisation - it is 100% configurable through the administation interface. This means that Cezanne can provide regular upgrades with new functionality, but you won’t be able to perform custom development for more specialised functionality. From what we’ve seen this is very flexible and configurable, and should meet the needs of mid-sized business.

Second, Cezanne OnDemand is improving quickly. The service currently sees around 3-4 major new releases each year, with further minor releases scheduled in between. In conducting this review, we’ve seen improvements to the performance management / development planning functionality, and also to people moves. We like that customers have the ability to vote for new features using Cezanne’s support tools, which gives you some say in the future of the product. We like the performance management features in Cezanne OnDemand

Third, the analytics functionality compares well. There is a nice dashboard, which can be personalised for your needs. It is very visual. There are a wide variety of charts, and the ability to drill down for further information. Cezanne also includes a good set of end-user search and reporting tools.

Fourth, Cezanne is targeted at mid-market organisations, but we feel that it could happily be used at either bigger or smaller companies. The service is priced per active employee per month, rather than a large upfront cost. Cezanne is UK-based, but used by companies in many countries. For larger organisations, they do support more complex configurations, such as:

• Multiple currencies
• Localisation for employees in different locations
• Regional variances in absence rules
• Complex organisational structures, including different reporting lines (by role, person, or team), and multiple roles per person

Core employee records functionality is comprehensive, and should meet the needs of most organisations

Finally, mobile. Cezanne currently offer a mobile app for Android devices, and plan to release iPhone and iPad apps in 2014. Cezanne OnDemand currently offers an Android app, with an iPhone and iPad app on the way

In our review, Cezanne OnDemand strikes a good balance of simplicity and power. It has real benefits for companies making the move to cloud - regular upgrades, unit pricing, is fully-managed by Cezanne, and includes the features needed by a more complex organisation. We recommend Cezanne OnDemand for your shortlist.