Workday's configurable fields

Workday's configurable fields is always an advantage mentioned in the sales cycle, so some brief thoughts on this topic as I've had a chance to try it out from a European perspective.  In conjunction with Workday, we are also implementing a managed services, outsourced payroll provider.  As a part of that the new mantra has become, 'if it's in payroll and not a calculated element, we need to make Workday the source and interface the data'.  So any employee demographic data or 'flat' data will need a home in Workday.  This differs from our current landscape where we have certain fields that could be housed in PeopleSoft, but the payroll system was really considered the owner of the data so data was maintained more consistently there.

So I'm doing a lot of analysis and solutioning these days of historically 'payroll' data.  Currently, as payroll implementation discussions are happening in each country, the teams are reviewing the data in payroll and forwarding over questions, as to where/how it can be stored in Workday. 

I've had a chance to review the Disability setup in Workday, based on various countries requesting this data for payroll.  In Europe, a lot more data is potentially tracked than in the US, and it differs per country.  There are government reporting requirements, and as I've heard from some HR in country, there are some tax benefits for the company if you employ people who fall under this classification.

In our current PS environment, there is one page with any relevant field, and a data entry person has to know which is relevant for the country.

WD lets us turn fields on and configure at a country level, so if your employee belongs to country X, then you get the relevant fields for country X.  Just a quick visual here, the first is a European country with all options turned on.  The second is the equivalent for a US employee.  There are more fields on both pages, but just wanted to give you a snippet of how the differences appear:
























This will be quite helpful from a data entry perspective, as we'll be able to keep the entry screen clean, with only the relevant fields for a country.

From an analysis perspective though, this is why WD takes so long some days.  We don't have this level of granularity in the current system, so going out to compare to the payroll system, confirm with the relevant HR, payroll or compliance/reporting people the mandatory vs. optional fields then to document at a country level, do the configuration, define the data load, get the data from the current source, load, test, etc. all takes a lot of time. 

Overall, I like what I'm seeing, this is an improvement over PS.