Last week Ceridian HCM invited out a good dozen-plus analysts to an event in Chicago to catch us all up to speed on developments at the company. As best I can tell, I was the only vertically-oriented analyst there, which speaks strongly to the company’s position in retail these days.

I am admittedly not an HCM analyst (that’s human capital management) — I don’t really care much about the nitty-gritty of payroll or talent management, especially when it comes to salaried workforces. What I care most about is hourly employees in stores and distribution centers and call centers, and how workforce management in particular helps retailers better manage the customer experience.

But every once in awhile, it’s good to take a step back, take a wider view, and that was definitely the case with Ceridian. I confess, when the company acquired Dayforce, I wasn’t really quite sure what to make of it. Ceridian does payments, and loyalty cards, and things like that. Labor management? It seemed weird. But the strategy came clear last week, and it poses some interesting questions both for retailers and for solution providers in the workforce management space (WFM).

Ceridian has put together an end-to-end HCM platform — Dayforce HCM, complete with payroll, benefits, WFM and — here’s where the payments part gets interesting — disbursements. I remember the days when, as a store associate at Kmart (yes, I was a blue light special girl), I got paid in cash. In this day and age, how many retailers cut checks as the primary method of payment vs. direct deposit — and how rapidly is that changing? My son is eagerly awaiting the day when he turns 13 and can get a debit card of his own. I suspect he will write far fewer checks than I do even today, and may receive even fewer checks than me. So the Ceridian acquisition of Dayforce is very interesting from that perspective. Schedule to time management to payroll and on up into the strategic side of HCM — all integrated on a single platform.

The hard part comes from this definition of the workforce space, especially for hourly employees. With most other vendors, WFM has been defined as more about managing the work that these employees do — so that WFM should theoretically be tied more closely to Task Management and store operations in the store, warehouse management and supply chain needs in the distribution center, and Call Center management in the call center. Supply chain vendors that are eyeing store fulfillment solutions and customer order management are even at this moment trying to figure out the labor management of this equation, reaching into capability enablement that has already been staked out by more traditional WFM vendors.

Ceridian seems to be defining WFM more in the context of managing an employee’s life with a company. For salaried workers, that’s not an issue. For the more transient labor in stores and DC’s, that’s tougher. But the company does seem to be seeing a vibrant community and high use of such things as mobile apps for accessing schedules and managing shift availability and shift change requests, as well as time off requests — all among hourly workers. The company has paid a lot of attention to ease of access for store employees who don’t typically have corporate email addresses, and are working towards embedding social media-like capabilities to give corporate HR processes more of a Twitter or Facebook feel — user experiences that are likely something store employees are highly familiar with.

In fact, if there is one theme that I can highlight from the day, it is that Ceridian has a laser-like focus on improving the user experience — of taking pain out of processes. That came through when they were talking about HR staff, and also when talking about hourly staff. I’m guessing that this is one reason why Dayforce emerged so strongly onto the WFM scene not so long ago.

And in Ceridian’s care, it looks like Dayforce will continue to be a force to be reckoned with.