But I just want a basic report!

We are currently trundling through our rest of world (non US, Canada, Mexico) Workday implementation. We are in the second round of test loading data.

As a part of our data validation our Workday implementation partner is issuing reports to us from the test system. I am combining these reports with PeopleSoft reports in Access. Then our HR community is reviewing the data to ensure that it matches.

One of the items that we need to validate is 'HR Partner.' In PeopleSoft we have an HR partner assigned at the department level. We're bringing that over to Workday and assigning an HR partner to a supervisory org (along with other roles such as Absence partner).

I have a report from PeopleSoft, it includes two fields: Department ID and HR manager ID.

Trying to get the equivalent from Workday is like trying to get blood from a stone.

First our Workday implementation partner ran me a report that looked something like this:


Our Workday implementation partner seems to be staffed with consultants who have never worked in-house. Fair enough, a lot of consulting houses are like this, as they've never done operational support they have no concept of how things actually work once the software is turned on.

I know everyone likes to say how great Workday is, that you no longer need to know codes you can work off of description but try matching on names from two different systems. People get married, etc. it's just inefficient.

Also, how am I supposed to parse all of the gobbletygook in the box?

I clarified the request and asked specifically for 'Supervisory Org code' and 'HR Partner employee ID'. In return I received this response:

Due to the Worker, Sup Org, and security business objects in Workday, we’re limited from splitting out a single org’s assignments into multiple rows when an org has multiple assignments. We’re trying one last effort during India time tomorrow to see if we can get it to work, but it’s not looking promising.

I mentioned a while back when I took the reporting class, how Workday reporting is not intuitive, but these folks are experts, Workday certified consultants.

I'm not quite sure if the problem is consultant knowledge or the Workday system itself. If I ever get to the bottom of it I'll let you know. In the meantime we'll just go on a wing and a prayer than our HR Partner data is being converted successfully.

Implementing Workday: size does matter!

Last week at the Workday Rising conference, one of the most interesting things for me was to hear from other customers:  what functionality they are using, what is their support model, and what is their roll out schedule.  It seems that WD marketing and sales has done a good job of spreading the idea that the software can be rolled out perfectly on a very fast timeline.  Our own CIO was on a call explaining the new 'we're going cloud for all applications' strategy and made the statement:  those business processes, the ones that are taking you 6 months now to design, those will take 6 hours in the new world!  Actually, I'm discovering over time, that's not really the case.

There was an interesting presentation by a small WD customer, 500 employees, industry = wealth management.  They had rolled out HCM plus Financials in 12 weeks, then brought in expense management quickly, and are further augmenting their HCM use.  I compare it to a session on the same day by a large pharmaceutical company of 130k employees who explained their global roll out strategy.  They started with Asia and were going West to Europe and Latin America and finally finishing up with the US.  It was an interesting concept to me, as the bulk of the companies and people that I know start with the US and head East to Europe.

This pharma explained that they were on SAP and their US office was happy with it, so they were going to get the rest of the world on board first, although they did have to do some workarounds, such as putting in some shell records for US managers of employees in the non-US regions, in order to be able to approve goals etc.

They started WD implementation in 2012 have launched Asia countries (including payroll interfaces for some) and are working their way around the globe.

They also made the statement that they were two weeks from launching SAP in the UK and pulled the plug on the project, which sounds quite similar to us, except we were 1 year into a PSoft upgrade.

I mentioned last year, on our US implementation, that the project launch encountered a delay, so that the US launch was in December instead of October.  We're now going through re-sizing efforts on the Wave 2 Europe launch.  Rather than launching Europe for Jan 2015, we're now splitting the group up, with some countries to keep January but others to delay.

This certainly isn't to blame WD as a software application (which is being done internally in my organization as people seemed to think this was a 'magic' software that would fix all of our HR process issues) and they're now seeing the same issues on a new software platform.

It's currently my thinking that especially where you have a large and decentralized environment and you are injecting any sort of standardization or HR Transformation as a part of the mix, implementing WD is the same as implementing a traditional ERP...it's a multi-year effort due to all of the change management and factors outside of the software.  When you're a small company with Excel-based processes or on one Finance, one Expense system, you're able to make that 12 week implementation schedule as you can more readily fit the mold of standardize, change, launch.

Workday in a global phased approach

Part of our company has gone live on Workday, the rest is still to come.  I've been involved with multiple HRMS implementations in the past, both big bang and a waved approach.  A few thoughts in this moment on Workday in a phased approach.

• The setup of org structures really challenges a waved approach.  Back in the good old days, with a software such as PeopleSoft, you would simply put the minimum in for a group, and leave other fields blank, such as department supervisor.  Workday wraps a lot more into the orgs, and more data is required.  So either you are dumping people into large bucket orgs just to get the people in (to be corrected later), or you're having to define the org structure completely.

• If you have a large cross-country management population, Workday in a phased approach will be challenging.  For example, many of our US folks have non-US managers.  We've had to *hire* these non-US people into Workday, as it was the only way to show the 'real' manager of the emp.  (The other options considered were to give them all one bucket supervisor and hire that person, or to give them US managers or to hire the non-US managers as non-employees).  It was deemed insufficient by the business to give them 'fake' information, especially as the data flows downstream to places like expense management.  Therefore, our Workday certified consultants recommended that our best option was to *hire* the non-US people.  As you can imagine, this will be quite a jigsaw puzzle to put together once we get to those countries, to make sure we don't load that non-US manager twice.  (sigh)

• We had considered to roll in the countries as we have a country done, via Workday's delivered EIB functionality.  Then, a group could submit the completed Excel and the current operational support team would load the files.  Our consultants have instructed us, however, that this is not an option, as Workday requires you to take down the system to implement new groups.  I'm not sure on this one, but we regularly acquire new companies and large groups, and like many other large companies, we have people around the globe in the system at all times.  We have other SaaS HR applications, and the do require you to take the system down for major configuration changes.  However, I'm struggling to understand why a new employee load requires system downtime.

• We are cross-challenged by other variables outside of the US, such as the timing for payroll implementations.  Country X can only go live in January and country Y prefers to go with their tax year that start in April.  Therefore this org thing and the lack of flexibility there puts us between a rock and a hard place but payroll tends to trump.

• I've been chatting with other WD customers in London, most of them are small firms and everyone has gone big bang.

Watch this space, it's bound to get interesting.