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.

The frequency of Workday's upgrades

Our move to Workday is an overall strategic direction to move applications to the cloud.  One of the major points that was highlighted in the presentations of many of our business leaders was the frequency of updates of Workday; I recall the graphic used to represent the current ERP providers was a herd of dinosaurs.  ;-)

When we started this project, WD was on version 17 and they're now on 21 with 22 just around the corner.  Thankfully WD is doing twice per year updates rather than three times a year, as the testing and re-writing of training documentation, etc. can be quite an effort.  I had written about the overall Tenant Management Process a while back.

I was reading some of the discussion on Workday Community (Workday's portal for customers, it is a helpful source of information and to connect with other customers).  The current upgrade version timing is listed, along with some tentative dates.  A lot of discussion centers around the Winter/Summer timing, as opposed to being Spring/Autumn.  So Winter is Jan/Feb Summer is Jul/Aug, if the tentative timing is any guide.  I realize that no date is perfect for everyone, but a few key points here:

• A lot of companies are still closing out the calendar year in January, doing performance reviews, etc.  Resourcing can be a challenge.

• For those of us in Europe, Jul/Aug are key holiday months for most of the continent.  While it can be quiet as most employees take vacation or facilities are completely closed, it can also be scarce in HR departments too.

• WD 22 is scheduled for Easter weekend.  Back when I worked in the US, I recall system launches during holidays, to take advantage of employees not needing or using the systems.  Since I moved to Europe however, I've discovered the joy of the four day Easter holiday weekend.  Most countries over here are completely off and trying to get people to work on those days would be a struggle.  This point takes me back to a regular point:  WD still does not bring a global mindset to the table.  (But they're getting there.  I noticed some new non-US functionality--such as French government reports-- is included in WD 21 and WD 22, so pleased as punch to see that.)

• On the other side of the coin, if you want to use functionality in your comp process let's say, you cannot want for the summer upgrade, it really needs to get there early in the year.

• I'm continuing to see WD Tenant Manager jobs advertised, it seems that companies are recognizing the efforts that are needed in this space.

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!

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.

Is Workday more complex that it appears? Or is the software not strong enough?

I've had a quiet week as my US HR colleagues are currently on an emergency trip to the HR Shared Service Center to try and sort out some Workday operational issues.  As you may recall, we had a soft launch in the US in December.  Now that everyone is back from their holidays and the first monthly payroll of January has run, it appears that post-implementation issues are larger than expected.  So a swat team of HR project members are planted in the SSC office to try and train them again and work through some issues.  A few key points:

1. It appears that some end-to-end processes really are not end to end.  So the processes work in the system, you can hire someone, transfer them, but at the end of the day, all of the dots are not connected on the process side, so they have orphaned tasks or recognizing that the WD process is a certain system data entry piece piece of a bigger functional process, such as a hire which requires non-system activity such as background checking.

2. Robustness of manager processes or lack of manager training?  My boss has been trying promote an employee using the manager self-service and it's required multiple HR people to help him to do this task.  Noticing online, there's not a lot of opportunity to provide dynamic help text, especially along the way.  You can enter help text into a transaction, but it's not smart enough to recognize what is wrong necessarily, which is the issue.  As well, the system is a little bit loosey goosey.  It's not as locked down as it should be for less knowledgeable or astute managers.

3. Change management/staffing.  In the sales cycle, it is insinuated that you can run the software with only trained monkeys, it's that easy.  Our SSC (who are bright data entry people, btw) are new to Workday as well as to the company.  The software is not so intrinsically easy that they can just pick it up and use it.  Further, similar to the above loosey goosey comment, it lets them do things online that they should not.  Not that WD is not an easy software, just that it's not so easy like looking at a web page, it's a software application like any other, so it requires training.  Further, with WD's updates, the pages change up to three times a year which does not help the people who are just learning it.

So I remain undecided whether the issue is:

• Workday isn't as easy as it is suggested to be.
• HR's training efforts were not good enough.
• The software is too flexible and open, so you actually need highly talented people to utilize it.
• Our implementation of the software is the issue, not the software itself.

Workday European data conversion & thoughts

So we're in the phase of reviewing our Europe PeopleSoft data and test loading it to Workday.  We have up to 10 years of history in some locations, and data integrity is not always the best.  Some thoughts so far:

-emergency contact data in Workday requires 1 piece of contact data (phone, email or address).  PeopleSoft does not.  Phone is a freeform in PeopleSoft, in Workday there are validation edits.  So we have a lot of issues of either missing or non-standard formatted data.

-phone overall is a bit of an issue, such as employee personal phone, emergency contacts, etc.  Workday breaks out the phone number with country code, area code, rest of phone, and applies some validation edits such as 'must be between length 4-8' for rest of phone if country = X.  As this has always been a free form field in PeopleSoft, it has depended upon the skills of the data entry professionals to type in the data cleanly, according to our standards.

-Workday is still letting me down with name formatting.  For whatever reason, Workday does not offer the option to configure names.  So in the case of Portugal, middle name is not delivered, nor can you 'turn it on', even though it exists for other countries.  Portuguese names tend to be very long, so we'll need to combine it somehow into the first name field, but it will get shortened then in downstream systems, or we'll need to break it apart in the integrations, based on spacing, etc.  Messy.

-Action reasons are configurable per country.  On one hand, I like this, so that you can have the specialised leave reasons for European countries, per country, which the other countries would not see.  On the other hand, where there are common ones across the region, it's a bit of data entry to have to add it each time for 18+ countries.  From that perspective, having the one global set in PeopleSoft is nicer.

-Marital status is based on work location.  I'm still undecided on this one.  So it's a setup of each value, again per country.  So if you have 50 countries in use in your database, you're setting up the code of 'Single' 50 times.  Where I struggle with this one, is that, let's say you're an employee in a European country with a marital status of X, but you're working in another country which does not have the status of X.  So now you're having a status assigned to you that is not necessarily correct.  Understanding that for tax reasons you can only have the status available in your working country, however, I'm waiting to see how this plays out as we have a lot of cross-border workers.

Back to work - Europe implementation

Hi again.  It's been a busy few months outside of work.  To catch up...our US offices went live on Workday in late December.  As well, it's been an interesting time as there was an element of 'HR Transformation' that occurred as part of the implementation, so new people, new roles, new software, new ways of doing business, etc.

We're now in the early stages of launching the Europe offices, starting a European kick-off for a waved approach, with the first country launches to be in early 2015.  Should be interesting times.