Undoing a Workday Data Load EIB

I was browsing the Workday Community site, catching up on the Customer forum postings.  This one caught my eye:

I am a new in Workday and need your help regarding EIB.
I have uploaded an EIB for Contingent worker but now i need to rollback the changes.
Can you please help me in this regard.

Yikes!  Can you imagine? 

We are a large company and currently load data every single work day in our PeopleSoft environment, using Excel to CI (with the files being prepared and loaded by the IT team).  Workday's EIB functionality is awfully similar to the PSoft functionality, using (bulky and cumbersome) Excels to prepare and load data.  Both systems offer 'validated' data entry through these load processes, so a cleaner way to load data than say, a SQL load.  Both offer equally cryptic data load reports so that you know where you've loaded data or had issues.

So where are we today in Production?

 

Our US colleagues have made the decision to give EIB to the newly formed shared services center.  They have backed off of their original intent however, of anything more than 10 rows should be loaded and have completely given up on doing any new Hire loading, as it's been deemed as 'too complex'.

It's interesting to me as historically we don't have the data entry people loading data, but HR Transformation continues to turn the world upside-down.

My two cents, as I continue to delve into Workday functionality and imagine our future state world in Europe...

Advantages of Workday EIB functionality over PeopleSoft Excel to CI

 

1. WD gives you the templates out the box.  In PSoft we need our developers to do some building to create the option to load.  So we made a prioritized list and gradually worked our way through it.

2. If the WD functionality is broken, it's on them to fix it, not your developers.

3. Workday allows you to 'define' the template--so you're able to remove optional columns at the get go to save the user the hassle of seeing non-used extras.  In our PSoft world we do a manual workaround (we give the users a skinnier version of the Excel, and then paste it back into our normal, bigger one).

4. There is a roll-back option!  (Ha!  Lucky for that fellow who asked the question to the forum!)  You can use the 'Mass Rescind Business Processes'.  In our PSoft world, we'd either do another Excel to CI in correction mode to fix the 'wrong' data or we'd send in the users to manually delete rows.

Advantages of PeopleSoft Excel to CI over Workday EIB functionality 

 

1. You can build whatever Excels to CI whenever you want, for whatever you want.  In WD you are stuck waiting for them to build the functionality.  So you make a Brainstorm and then hope people vote it up and that it's easy for WD to build.  For example, a company put out a request to WD to create an EIB for healthcare rates as they have 4k lines to enter due to their retiree plans.

2. If the WD functionality is broken, you're stuck waiting for them to fix it vs. having in-house resources fixing something as top priority.

3. A minor observation, but a continuing dark lining in the HCM cloud is that these tools are not always as intuitive as they portray during the sales cycle.  For example, if you want to load a blank value into PeopleSoft, you put a space (i.e. blank) into the cell in your Excel to CI, which is common sense.  In Workday, you put this into the cell:  {empty}