Business-Driven ConfigurabilityConfiguring Workday to meet your organization’s unique needs

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Overview

All packaged applications require initial setup to support

the unique requirements of the business being supported.

As businesses grow and evolve with new business divisions,

markets, geographies, and regulatory requirements, the

applications that support them need to adapt in concert

to maintain relevancy for the business. The flexibility of

a system is measured in the ease of the initial application

deployment. The agility of a system is measured in its

ability to easily adapt post-implementation to the changing

needs of the business.

Traditional legacy ERP systems are generally considered

to be neither flexible nor agile because of their lack of

configuration options. During the initial implementation, the

inability to mold the application around the business with

configuration options makes for long and expensive project

implementations. Post go-live, the inability of legacy ERP

systems to adapt and evolve makes these applications rigid,

deteriorating their value over time, as they no longer reflect

the changing requirements of the business they support.

As a workaround, in-house specialist IT personnel or

third-party consultants added hard-coded customizations.

This was not only time consuming and expensive for IT,

it was highly disruptive to the business and also had the

downstream effect of breaking future software upgrades.

The end result was enormously complex applications with

an extremely high lifetime cost of ownership that ultimately

impeded business change as opposed to enabling it.

Workday has corrected that flawed delivery and ownership

model by designing our applications with configuration as a

core design principle for both initial setup and post go-live

reconfiguration. With configuration options a core aspect of

the system, the customer can change and evolve the system

Business-Driven ConfigurabilityConfiguring Workday to meet your organization’s unique needs

as the needs of the business change and evolve without

breaking future updates—all delivered at a lower total cost

of ownership. What’s more, these changes can be driven by

the business user, saving valuable IT resources and budget

for other more strategic-driven projects.

As a result, Workday deploys in a fraction of the time

and cost of traditional legacy ERP systems. Workday also

continues to maintain its relevancy to the business post-

implementation by quickly and easily adapting to the

changing requirements of the business.

This document highlights the flexibility and agility of

Workday business-driven configurability versus hard-

coded, IT-driven customization required by many traditional

ERP deployments.

The scope of this document highlights some of the most

common areas of configuration from both an initial setup

and post go-live perspectives. It should not be considered

an exhaustive guide. This document will look specifically at

the following configuration features:

• Organizations

• Business Process Configuration

• Custom Ad Hoc Reporting

• User-Defined Calculated Fields

• Configurable Packaged Integrations

Organizations

Workday is designed to manage both centralized and

de-centralized operations. Any organization structure or

employee grouping can be created, and more importantly,

easily modified at any point in time. Organizations are

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the basic building block of any company structure and are

constantly changing as staffing changes occur. Workday

organization structures are specifically designed to provide

maximum flexibility. You can create new organization

types very easily, insert them into existing organization

structures, and update the characteristics of current

organization structures. Organizations may also be divided,

combined, or deleted. A powerful feature of Workday is

that these changes do not affect the reporting hierarchy for

approvals or the cost center organization structures. This

becomes particularly relevant for large, complex activities

like mergers and acquisitions or divestitures.

The following types of organizations may be used in

Workday:

• Supervisory

• Company

• Cost Center

• Region

• Business Site Hierarchy

• Matrix

• Team

• Custom

Different types of organizations track different information.

“Supervisory” organizations track workers and reporting

structures. “Cost centers” track expenses for financial

reporting purposes. “Companies” provide a vehicle for

statutory reporting. “Regions” track designated territories.

“Business Site Hierarchies” track geographic locations.

“Matrix” organizations track dotted line or matrix reporting

structures. “Teams” are ad hoc organizations that can

be used for multiple purposes such as project teams or

committees. You can configure an unlimited number of

each type of organization, and then use them for different

types of reporting. Lastly, Workday enables you to define

other “custom” organization structures to track other types

of organizations, like union membership, board members,

or center of excellence. There is no limit to the number of

organizations you create and link to your workers.

Organization Set Up

Creating organizations is easy. Simply choose organization

type and the appropriate roles and permissions for the

organization. No IT involvement is needed to configure and

maintain your company’s organization structure.

Organiza�on sub-type values are completely configurable and allow you to reflect your organiza�on’s nomenclature.

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Reorganizations

Workday is unique in its ability to re-organize your

company’s organizational structure quickly and easily.

Whole organizations and subordinate organizations may be

added or moved, complete with their business site rollups.

Workers can be moved or reassigned en masse with or

without structural changes such as dividing or deactivating

organizations.

Workday’s flexible organizations also allow you to

reorganize on the fly. Whether you’re creating new business

entities or geographic divisions, rearranging cost center

structures, or moving organizational reporting relationships

from one group to another, you’ll be able to perform these

actions quickly and easily within Workday. Workday allows

you to reorganize your structures with a new effective date

through the following types of actions:

• Create a new superior organization

• Create a new subordinate organization

• Divide an organization, and move workers into

their appropriate organizations

• Move workers from one organization to another

• Inactivate an organization, and move workers to

other organizations

Workday’s reporting tools work in concert with your

reporting structures, allowing you to create and run reports

using organizational parameters. For example, you can run

any staffing reports for cost centers, regions, companies, or

reporting structures.

It is important to note that when employees are

reorganized, reporting relationships are automatically

changed, reducing the amount of data maintenance for

you. For example, if the Payroll department is moved from

Human Resources to Finance, this new chain of command

will be reflected on the employee record, and any business

process workflow or event that needs to move up the chain

of command will automatically go to the correct managers.

Business Process Configuration

Workflow was introduced in the 1980s and bolted onto

the architectures of existing legacy ERP systems that are

still in use today. As a result, the workflows were blind to

any organizational structure or worker reporting changes.

To ensure the workflow routing reflected the company’s

current structure and business processes, regular IT

maintenance was required. As the business grows and

evolves, the workflow business rules changed, requiring

major IT effort to reprogram the workflow.

Learning from the past, Workday designed its workflow,

called the Business Process Framework, into the core of

the application and tied it directly to the organizational

structures and role based security. Any changes to these

structures are automatically reflected in the workflow

routing. For business rule changes, Workday Business

Process Framework is designed for the non-technical user,

allowing a user with appropriate security access to easily

make business rule updates. All changes are effective dated

and audited.

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“We’re now a little over two

years live and we have spent

zero dollars on updates, Zero.

We spend 3-5 days testing the

product 3 times a year. Three

weeks versus nine months,

zero dollars versus hundreds of

thousands of dollars. That speaks

for itself. There’s your ROI.”

- Mark Newsome, Sr. HR Manager, McKee Foods

Finally, Workday comes delivered with over 200

preconfigured best practice business processes available to

the customer to easily configure and reconfigure according

to the changing nature of their business. For example you

may add or change:

• Rules and conditions

• Designated approvers

• Revision steps

• To-do lists and checklists

• Notifications

• Custom help text

• Related policy web links

• Reassignment of ‘My Tasks’

• Updates to third party systems

• Report attachments

Workday also has the unique ability to rescind a completed

workflow, returning the system to its former state while

updating all parties involved.

Supports unique processes for a specific division, business unit, country, etc.

Easily configure all steps and par�cipants and no�fica�ons.

Easily configure sophis�cated rules with no custom coding.

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Reporting Custom Ad Hoc Reports

Workday’s Report Writer allows you to configure

sophisticated interactive, drillable reports that may be

exported to Microsoft Excel® or Adobe Acrobat®. Online

reports shared to other users are automatically filtered

through the recipients security profile, ensuring only

authorized information is displayed.

User-Defined Calculated Fields

Customers can define unique calculated fields available for

use in business rules or dynamic reports.

Calculated fields allow you to perform arithmetic, date

calculations, text manipulation, logical expressions, retrieval

of related data, and transformations of existing data. You

can use calculated fields in reporting, business processes,

integrations, scheduling recurring processes, and other

areas within Workday.

Click Ac�on link to take ac�on on an employee or other data right from the report!

Easy-to-use Report Writer allows you to create sophis�cated reports that can be integrated into your screens and processes.

Tag employees in the report. Filter. Export to Excel or PDF.

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All reports are natively drillable, so you can easily click,

drill, and analyze the data to meet your requirements.

Since many pages in Workday are simply reports, you can

create actionable pages with these calculated fields.

Analytics and Graphical Reports

Workday’s Report Writer can create many types of content,

including analytics, charts, links, and more, allowing

companies to configure valuable reports and tailor content

shown on Workday dashboards, all without customization.

Click Ac�on link to drill into detail.

Click chart to slice data by other a�ributes.

Easily click to select the a�ribute to analyze your data.

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Exportable Dynamic Reports

Workday reports may be dynamically embedded in third-

party tools such as Microsoft Excel, due to Workday’s

support of the REST web service standard. Report security

is maintained and may be refreshed on demand to ensure

the data is in sync with the Workday system.

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Configurable Packaged Integrations

Workday provides and maintains packaged configurations

to many popular applications, extending Workday’s

functionality, and eliminating common customizations

that legacy ERP customers often make. These integrations

include integrations to third-party payroll processing

systems, third-party benefits providers, time and

attendance, CRM, recruiting and learning management

systems. Cloud Connect for Benefits provides a simple

framework for setting up integrations to third-party

benefits providers allowing Workday to update those

benefit providers with staffing and benefit election changes.

Workday, Inc. | 6230 Stoneridge Mall Road | Pleasanton, CA 94588 | United States 1.925.951.9000 | 1.877.WORKDAY (1.877.967.5329) | Fax: 1.925.951.9001 | www.workday.com

© 2011. Workday, Inc. All rights reserved. Workday and the Workday logo are registered trademarks of Workday, Inc. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

Summary

In the legacy ERP world, customization and its downstream

high cost of ownership was the norm. Now you have an

alternative. Workday is designed with configuration in

mind—not just for the initial setup, but also for the all-

important unknown changes that will be needed post go-

live. Flexibility gets you ahead of the competition but post

go-live agility ensures you stay there.

About Workday

Workday is the leader in enterprise-class, software-as-a-

service (SaaS) solutions for managing global businesses,

combining the lower cost of ownership with an innovative

approach to business applications. Founded by PeopleSoft

veterans Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, Workday

delivers unified Human Capital Management, Payroll, and

Financial Management solutions designed for today’s

organizations and the way people work. Delivered in the

cloud leveraging a modern technology platform, Workday

offers a fresh alternative to legacy ERP. More than 200

customers, spanning mid-sized organizations to Fortune

500 businesses, have selected Workday.