Workday Studio

WORKDAY STUDIO

What Is Workday Studio?

Workday Studio is a powerful development tool enabling customers and partners to build sophisticated integrations to and from Workday. These integrations are 
deployed and run on your behalf on integration servers in Workday’s data center. 

Aimed at skilled developers and offered as a set of plug-ins to the Eclipse IDE, Workday Studio offers a rich, graphical development environment in which a user can drag and drop a variety of reusable components that handle the “plumbing” aspects of integration building, freeing you to focus on the critical business logic. 
Workday has been using this valuable tool for years to deliver all of our packaged integrations and connectors as well as the EIB.

Use Workday Studio to unlock the power of Workday’s integration infrastructure:• Run your Workday Studio integrations like any other Workday integration—configure, launch, schedule, monitor, and even audit your  integrations.

• Use powerful and productive development tools optimized for interacting with your Workday tenant 

• Build sophisticated and highly customizable integrations without the need to own or manage any on premise integration middleware or servers.

When to Use Workday Studio?

If the integration you want to develop has any one of the following characteristics, it is a good candidate for a Workday Studio integration:

• Multiple different data sources and/or delivery requirements

• Scalable and efficient processing of potentially very large data sets (up to tens of    gigabytes)

• Complex looping or branching logic based on dynamic data or external variables

• Sophisticated change detection requirements

• Complex error scenarios and corresponding need to react differently to error conditions

• Need for rigorous source code control, unit testing, debugging, logging, and other formal development disciplines

• Need to extend with custom capabilities implemented in Java, Spring, or a third-party service

• Need to develop related integrations for other services which also offer an Eclipse-based development environment

Workday Integration Cloud Connect 

Workday Integration Cloud Connect consists of a growing number of packaged integrations and connectors to complementary solutions that are 100% built, supported, and maintained by Workday. The benefits of this approach to the customer are many, including access to a set of integrations that are:

• lower cost, lower risk, and faster to deploy without requiring any coding;

• fully supported by Workday and are certified and tested across updates and patches; and

•treated like any other part of the product, with a published product roadmap.

What Is a Packaged Integration? 

Workday offers customers complete packaged integration solutions that are built on an open, standards-based API and hosted within the Workday Cloud. This set of integration solutions is delivered, maintained, and supported by Workday and currently includes integration to 160+ benefit carriers, Kronos, TalentLink, Safeguard, Salesforce, Cybersource, and others. Packaged integrations allow customers to leverage their current investments without adding additional costs and overhead within their IT 

departments

What Is a Connector? 

In addition to packaged integrations, Workday also provides Connectors, which are slightly different from packaged integrations in that they provide a framework for building an integration of a certain type based on integration templates. Examples of Connectors include the Workday Payroll Interface, which reduces the time, cost, and complexity of integrating to third-party payroll providers. 

Connectors are configured integrations that generate an intermediate file output format that contains all the needed data and is subsequently transformed to (or 

from) a specific vendor format. For example, Workday generates a “Workday” format document, expressed as either XML or CSV, for connecting to a third-party 

payroll system that may not be offered as a packaged integration. In this case, you can then simply do the “last mile” yourself (using Workday’s integration tools), 

leveraging the packaged Connector, which already represents a large part of the effort.

Other Connectors, such as the ”Payment Connector” and the ”Punchout Connector,” are built to standards that are well structured and consistently adopted by third-party systems. In these cases, customers can configure these Connectors to work with any third-party system (e.g., a bank or supplier) that adheres to the standard. 

Integration Cloud Connect consists of the following six sub-networks:

• Cloud Connect for HCM - Extends Workday HCM by integrating to partners that provide capabilities including: recruiting, learning, time and attendance, and account provisioning (LDAP/Active Directory).

• Cloud Connect for Benefits - Extends Workday HCM by providing integration to a growing catalog of benefits providers, including: health insurance, health and flexible spending accounts, retirement savings plans, life insurance, AD&D insurance, and 

COBRA administrators

• Cloud Connect for Workday Payroll

• Cloud Connect for Third-Party Payroll 

• Cloud Connect for Spend Management 

• Cloud Connect for Financials

Putting It All Together: Payments Example 

One of the first examples shipped with Workday Studio shows how to create a one-time-payments integration to a third-party payroll vendor. This sample combines a 

number of aspects of the integration approach that has been described in this document :

1. Use a packaged connector to define the behavior of 

the base one-time-payments integration.

2. Call this integration on a scheduled basis from within a business process.

3. Once the integration completes, forward a reference to the generated document to a second (Workday Studio built) integration, which further processes this output by transforming it into a new file format. 

4. Subsequent to this, and again from within the business process framework, initiate an approval and delivery sequence whereby the final file proposed for delivery to the payroll vendor can be reviewed and approved in a normal workflow.

5. Once approvals are complete, deliver the file to the configured third-party endpoint, again powered by the business process framework.

All of the above is fully logged and audited, and any 

issues or errors that arise along the way can readily be 

corrected and the process re-started.

Organization types in Workday...

Organization types in Workday !

• Organizations enable you to group together resources, workers, costs, and other organizations for business process routing, security, analytical, and reporting purposes.
  
• 
  
• Generally, organizations have members and roles that support a specific business function. Workday delivers a number of different organization types for different functional purposes that are independent from one another.
  
• 
  
• For example, your supervisory organization reflects the reporting structure, and this may be completely different from your costing structure for which cost centers and regions are used. 
  

Organization type:

Company:The primary organization type used by Workday Financial Management. All financial transactions are for a company, and most financial reports are run in the context of a company, such as balance sheets and income statements.


Note: Workday recommends that you create a separate company for each internal entity with a separate tax ID. 



Cost Center: Used to track financial transactions and HCM transactions with a financial impact, such as hiring or terminations. Employees and contingent workers are assigned to a cost center when hired. You can roll up cost centers into cost center hierarchies, which can only store cost centers for reporting purposes. You cannot associate transactions with a cost center hierarchy.


Location: Locations are an attribute associated with a worker in a position, and can also be used for assets. Locations reflect a worker's work location rather than an area of responsibility. Locations can be structured as a hierarchy whereby Location A can be the superior of Location B. Location hierarchies have organizational roles and can include locations for grouping purposes. Location hierarchies can also be structured as a hierarchy whereby Location Hierarchy X can be the superior of Location Hierarchy Y. 

Create Location is used for creating a location. Location should be created before creating Supervisory organization. 

Region: Reflects the area of responsibility for a worker instead of the work location. For example, a sales person might work from a Miami location, which rolls up to North America, but might be responsible for sales to the Latin American region.

Core concepts of Workday.....

Core Concepts of Workday...

• Supervisory Organizations: The foundation of Workday HCM. This type of organization groups workers into a management hierarchy.

Ex:An organization for a group of Workers that report directly to one Manager.

Department;7554xxxx,ABC Company!

• Staffind Models: They define how jobs and positions are created and filled in a supervisory organization.

• Job Profiles: They are generic features and characteristics of a job and of a position that is built off that profile.

Ex.: An employer creates a job profile for many reasons. On the organizational side, the employer must analyze the job that a person will perform, including essential duties, which are performed often, and nonessential duties. These duties will be used to calculate the amount of pay, the job title, the salary or hourly designation and the position on the organizational chart. Managers assist the HR department with updating job profiles when positions must be advertised and filled. Each duty is written as a statement of what outputs a candidate must produce.

• Job Family: Abroad grouping of jobs that perform similar functions.                      Ex:Job families include information services, nursing,library/museum,services, accounting/finance.

• Compensation: The umbrella term for compensation packages,grades,grade profiles and plans.

• Compensation Plan:A component of pay that you use to assign monetary amounts to a worker’s pay.
• Compensation Package :A grouping of compensation guidelines and Compensation Plans that comprise all of the elements of Worker compensation. Ex:All Workers are assigned the ABC Company Compensation Package.
• Compensation Grade/Profile: Compensation Grade is assigned to a job profile based on the level of responsibilities  performed by an incumbent of the job profile. Pay ranges are defined in compensation grade profile.

• Security: A security group is a collection of users or a collection of objects that are related to users. Allowing a security group access to a securable item in a security policy grants access to the users associated with the security group.

• Business process: A series of activities when linked together achieve a desired business objective.Activities include tasks, To Do’s, approvals and upload of documents.Business Process Conditional Rule - A condition that defines routing of a business process.

The above stated are the core concepts of Workday...

Workday HCM

WORKDAY HCM

Most of the SAP HCM and HR consultants are shifting to Workday HCM side and I got curious to know what is it all about. Coming from SAP HCM and PMP certification backdrop, my thirst to learn new module increased and I started mining on Workday and here I come with my findings:

Workday uses powerful object action model that drives workday navigation. 

My online diary of my experience learning Workday HCM. Questions or ideas for posts? I can be reached at: joyjoshi@gmail.com. If this blog has helped you at all.

Aneel Bhusri 

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Aneel Bhusri is co-founder and chief executive officer at Workday. He is also a member of the company’s board of directors. Aneel has been a leader, product visionary and innovator in the enterprise IT industry for more than 20 years. Before co-founding Workday in 2005, Aneel held a number of leadership positions at PeopleSoft, including senior vice president responsible for product strategy, business development and marketing, and vice chairman of the board. He has served as an investing partner at Greylock Partners and as chairman of the board at Data Domain (acquired by EMC for $2.5 B in 2009).

In addition to his role at Workday, Aneel currently serves on the boards several private companies including, Cloudera, Okta, Tipping Point and Pure Storage.

Aneel received an MBA from Stanford University and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering and a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics, both from Brown University. Aneel is a Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

WORKDAY FEATURES:

Workday is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application Hosted by WorkdayAccessed via the web  Common, non-customizable software.  Best practices Works on a 3x per year release strategy.  New releases available in production in March, July, and November each year Workday application is cloud-based Broad integration requirements

CUSTOMER NOTE ON WORKDAY:

By replacing 80 systems with Workday, Flextronics experienced a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership.

– Mike McNamara, CEO, Flextronics

GLOBALLY IT HAS TO MAKE IT PRESENCE: It will become more global over time.
It’s not yet a ‘global’ application. Yes, I realize WD has been implemented in countries around the world. However, in some cases it seems like we’re missing some things. For example, company cars are frequently a benefit in Europe, and one’s HR system often tracks them. PeopleSoft has a few pages to this point–the car is set up, it’s applied to an individual. An individual is attached to a car plan for eligibility. It all ties together at the end of the day and enables you to have the basis of the data required by the UK government P11D reporting. When we asked WD about this, 1) they didn’t understand the requirement 2) they have no car pages, the best you can do is set up a car under the company property pages (where you won’t have the required data fields that you need, such as c02 emissions) 3) no such report is pre-existing in WD (according to the WD supplied resource doing the demo). So now we’ll be stuck, having to make an access database, or something else on the side, to support the business requirement.

Workday Home Page

Navigation through Workday is made simple through the use of powerful search capabilities and multiple navigation tools. All tasks and reports are secured and access requires you to be in the appropriate security group. If we cannot set a task, report, it is because we do not have permissions to access it. Security is configurable.

A European solution example in Workday

As a global company, we have offices and employees in almost every country in the world.

Much of our North American Workday implementation was based upon US requirements, with a handful of Mexico and Canada business needs sprinkled in.  This design, configuration and use became 'the global footprint'.

Now that we're looking at European countries as part of our next wave of implementation, in general the current use is getting challenged.  In addition, the design is getting extended for business requirements that did not exist in the US, e.g. contract data.

What is European contract data?

 

First, I'm not talking about contractors.  :) In Europe, most countries have the concept of employment contracts, so prior to accepting an employment offer, the contract provides a contract offer to the candidate (i.e. future employee), and the candidate may choose to sign 'as is' or negotiate some of the contract clauses.  Then both the candidate and a company representative sign the contract to make it official.  Each country will usually have different things that they put into their contracts, depending on local business practice.  There is no 'Euopean contract'.


If you get a big promotion such as from non-manager to manager or to a high position, you may get a new contract.  Otherwise, for smaller promotions, your contract would just get an addendum with any new details.

What kind of data is in a European contract?

 

Often, you'll have some general and overarching principles that apply to all employees, such as an ethics policy or general details about working conditions.

A contract will often hold basic data, such as the employee's name, home address, and job data such as title/position, the title/position that the role reports into, weekly hours, pay frequency, pay rate, hire date, seniority date (if differing for benefits calculations), notice period, probation date, etc.

As well, you'll find some 'eligibility' items 

• if a company provides a contribution to a pension on the employee's behalf, what is the percent
• if a company car is provided, what is the level/budget or allowance in lieu of car
• holiday entitlement
• private medical scheme, if offered
• what sort of sick pay you are entitled to
• etc.

 

What is the Workday functionality?

Workday gives us a page for contract data, it looks like this:

• Workday has the usual 'per country' configuration, so that you can set up your Contract Types per country, which is helpful.
• The attachments and comments feature is also there, so that is useful if we want to attach a copy of the contract.

Some of the job-related data found in the contract will be on the 'regular' Workday job pages.  Other data such as pension or health, we can try to store on the benefits screens.  However...

Where we're challenged in Europe, trying to use Workday

There's a lot of great fields on this page, which we would definitely use.  But we're struggling to figure out where to put the rest of the contract data.  It's like we were invited to dinner and only served the appetizer.  My current thought is that this page was designed without European input.  Mexico does have more of a concept of contracts, so maybe that was the driver, who knows.

Here are some areas that are providing heartburn at the moment.  And specifically, our payroll systems in the countries do have the concept of contract data, and would like to receive it on an interface from Workday.  Our HR people as well would like to be able to store and view this data.  So where are the disconnects?

1. Notice period

 

This particularly pains me, as it's such a basic concept that any European based HR system would contain.  A notice period is included in your employment contract.  The higher your position, the longer it is likely to be.  None of this '2 weeks notice' in Europe!Notice period in the UK and Germany will be for 3 months.  High level executives may have 6 months or a year even.

This applies to both the employer and the employee, and may differ, although if we could just get the employee one, that would be great.

Notice periods are often a 'date in words', for example:  3 months, 6 weeks, etc.  There is an added complexity to some, such as 1 month to the end of the quarter.  I've heard some other companies try to simplify and specify a number of day or weeks.

In addition, local labor law may specify a minimum statutory period, but as a company you may wish to put a longer notice period into place.

Workday has no functionality in this area!

There is a Workday Brainstorm (Workday's mechanism to make change requests to the application) from other companies to at least get a 'notice date' added.

2. Dual contracts

 

This comes up in various EU countries, in particular where we have better benefits than our NA counterparts.  :)  Often, an employee has a regular contract, and as a part of that may receive maternity benefits from either/both the company and/or government, depending on the country.

The employee on maternity may receive their regular benefits, but may want to work part time during maternity leave.  Usually in this case, the company will need to make a new contract with the relevant employment information.

Workday only allows for one active contract at a time!

Again, there's a Brainstorm to get this changed, or at least configurable to allow for two simultaneous contracts.

A workaround is to use Workday's 'multiple jobs' functionality.  If you put the employee into two distinct positions, the employee may have two active contracts at the same time.  However, that's a lot of work to enable, both from a functional and technical side, just to get some minimal contract data into place on a 2nd contract.

3. Contract renewal

In Europe, for better or for worse, it's more difficult to terminate an employee.  Often, we hire people on in temporary contracts.  Depending on the country, you are allowed to extend the contract a certain number of times, but after extension number x, it automatically converts the emp into a 'regular' contract (with all corresponding rights).

Workday missed to include this functionality!

Workday workaround:  Use the freeform 'Contract ID' field and get the data input folks to consistently put in '0001' for 1st contract, '0002' for 2nd contract, etc.  I don't like using freeform fields in this manner, as you end up doing extra auditing as people forget the 0's or make it length 5.

There's a Brainstrorm for this one too.

I could continue on here with my online gap analysis, but I think you get the idea.

Why is this especially irritating?

 

PeopleSoft has a lot more functionality!  Granted, we probably only using 10% of the fields on the pages, but they met our needs.  In my 'notice period' example above, we set up a contract clause for each notice period, such as the 'non competing' clause listed below.  As each employee has a contract, you then choose the relevant notice period clause for that employee.

In Summary

We're continuing to review the data against what our payroll systems need to receive.  As the contract data pages are not very robust in Workday, we'll be left having to 'MacGyver' it in, or not store it at all.

In discussions with our Workday certified consulting partner, the only thing they can tell us to do is: either don't store the data in Workday, or make custom objects, custom IDs etc. to accommodate it, recognizing that you don't have enough custom objects free to meet the needs.  As well, it would just be generally ugly from a data entry and reporting perspective, as well as not in harmony in one place, with some fields on the contract data pages and others independently as custom objects etc.

We currently have a workable solution in PeopleSoft, and in going to Workday it's seen by the users a going backwards as Workday does not come to the table with a real solution here.

Business Object

                                           Business Objects 

Workday stores your data as business objects—organizations, workers, positions, and so on—which can be thought of as database tables or worksheets in Excel. Just as a database table or worksheet has columns and rows, a Workday business object 

has fields and instances. 

A business object is composed of a set of related fields, similar to how a table or 

spreadsheet is composed of a set of related columns. 

Instances of a business object in Workday are like rows in a table or spreadsheet, with each instance representing a unique occurrence of that type of object such as an organization or 

worker. 

A business object can have no instances, one instance, or many instances. 

Workday automatically links related business objects together. For example, purchase 
order lines are linked to a purchase order header, the purchase order header is linked to a 
supplier, the supplier is linked to a company, and so on. 

Business Object Details can be found out by searching bo: business object name and then 
navigating to the same. 

Business object details can be seen with the help of workday delivered standard report i.e. Business Object Details Report which takes business object name as input. 

  
There will be 4 tabs on the Business Objects Details page: 

a) Fields---List of all fields which are part of a business object will be shown. 

b) Related Business Objects--- List of all business objects which are directly or indirectly 
    related to a business object will be shown. 

c) Data Sources – List of data sources of which the business object will be a part will be 
    shown. 

d) Reports – List of reports which uses the current business object will be shown. 


The Power of Objects: When you see something in Workday, you can perform an action on it.