Limelight

The workforce planning tool has been the biggest improvement to our processes, providing insights and projection accuracy that we didn't have previously. We're able to get both employee counts and paid time historically as well as projected values through our projection period.

While the workforce planning module has been the most useful tool to us, it's also been the most challenging to set up and run. This was a new process for us, and we have 35+ end-users in limelight. Most of our challenges have been creating an environment with intentionally limited input options so users don't "break" the calcs. Limelight's support team has been very responsive, even after go-live implementation, in helping solve our data input and template challenges.

One other item that has been a blessing and a challenge is the report books function. While this has been improving even in the first 6 months since implementation, the process for setting up a report book, identifying errors when the book fails, and outputs to excel are still a little challenging, and not as user friendly as much as the rest of the system. This is an area where I can see opportunities for big future improvements.

The software offers a lot of flexibility. I can present data in report format which is much more useful than the typical dashboard presentation views in other tools. The ability to use limelight for both data collection applications as well as distribution is great. The natural connectivity to Essbase means I don't have to invest much time in changing my existing reporting platforms to leverage limelight. I have had the tool now for 3 months and have successfully written over 30 reports that will serve 100+ users easily. My management team is excited about what we will be able to do with limelight to minimize data management overhead within the finance organization.

Graphing needs to be enhanced. Some small tweaks to report development would go along way. Looking forward to seeing version 3.

Being in the service industry, our most important expense is wages and it happens to be the most complex expense in our organization combining multiple collective agreements, progression rates, multiple benefits, and also incudes multiple funds , regions and departments. Limelight designed a combined integration of input from our accounting data base and manual overrides with recalculations that gives us the most accurate budget all the way down to the individual employee. What would normally take dozens of excel spreadsheets in all done through a few templates and flow trough to our financial statements under budget column

Limelight was able to provide us with all the necessary features so there is really nothing that I do not like in the software. It does take a bit of getting used to to navigate the steps but Limelight provided training and went so far as provide us with our own personal how to instructions .

Right from the start, the platform was visually familiar and seemingly uncomplicated. Its ability to communicate with our accounting software, virtually seamlessly, promised to increase our ROI on the time committed to completing variance reports and conducting variance analysis.

Throughout the demos I couldn't help but think "this is too good to be true, nothing is this easy". I was convinced of its benefits from the end user perspective but was concerned about the potential complication of the back end or maintenance of the software. Much to my surprise, Limelight was true to their word, the back end and maintenance has been just as smooth as promised.

Given that I am still in the construction stage, I am not in the position to comment on this aspect as of yet. So far, I am extremely pleased with the entire process, as well as the amazing team that introduced us to Limelight along with their colleagues who have worked with us to build the platform to suit.