Monday 3 March 2014

Workday modules (licensing woes!)

During the past two years, I've had a chance to do fit gap analysis and scope out how we'll meet our business requirements by data entry and processes within Workday.  As you might expect, a lot of the core HRMS fields are in Workday just like they would be in any other HRMS.  A few gotcha's however:

  1. Company credit cards 
    • Background  
      • we use equivalent functionality in PeopleSoft, mainly with a minimum field set.  We use it to flag that someone has a card, expiration date and card status (closed, etc), but none of the actual card details.  
      • We built an interface from the credit card (CC) vendor into PSoft to load the data automatically.  Then the team responsible for credit card administration runs existing reports to see what terminated employees have a non-closed card so that they can close the card and take steps toward chasing up any open balances.  The team in Europe has 90 days to get the balances paid off by the employee, otherwise they are written off.
    • Workday functionality 
      • Workday has credit card pages, and they look very similar to what we need and currently have in PeopleSoft, yay!
      • WD classifies the credit card pages under their 'Expenses' rather than 'HCM' module...so we cannot use them...booo!  :(
    • Our WD workaround?
      • Use the 'Business Asset' functionality.
        • The good:  it allows us by hook or by crook to shoehorn the data in there.
        • The bad: we cannibalized the pages to make the data fit.  Also, Business Assets are tied into the Finance Management side of WD, so there's a lot more background functionality that you need to work around.  Don't get me wrong, officially, you can use it under HCM, but you need to take care to not wander into the FM fields/processes, as those are not allowed.
  2. Non-employee/Contingent Worker Suppliers
    • Background - we store contractors, consultants, auditors, etc. in PeopleSoft currently, including their provider (Randstad, Hays, etc.)
    • Workday functionality
      • Workday allows you to store non-emps, yay!
      • Supplier (provider) is not an HCM field.  Instead, you're wandering back into the Finance side of things, and having to make big changes to business processes (BPs) to create a supplier setup process to be able to set up a supplier and associate it with a non-emp.
    • Our WD workaround?
      • Our WD certified consultants would prefer not to do all this extra work to get in one data element.  So now we're going back to the business to inquire further if they really truly need the supplier data on the 70%+ non-employees where they have entered it, or can we drop it when we go to WD.
      • If they do not agree either we'll need to start setting up the processes or we'll need to use one of our custom fields instead.
I'm sure we'll find more of these and no software is perfect.  However, I'm noting them here as I wasn't expecting to get tangled up with either of these.  Hope this helps someone out there!

3 comments:

  1. With regard to the contingent worker piece, we actually have a company with a large contingent worker population where tracking the supplier is critical. The direction we are going is setting up contingent-only cost centers that reflect the individual suppliers. This seems to take care of our need for tracking, but also serves a clean double duty in being able to export the information in to other systems in a way that is consistent with our other employees.

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  2. Brent,
    Thanks for the comment, this is specifically why I enjoy writing, to hear how others are tackling similar topics and as a source for new ideas and solutions. Keep the comments coming. :)

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  3. re: non-employees - could this include other non-employee types such as volunteers or interns?

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