Workday Data Validation
As a Workday HCM client, you may have data conversion responsibilities for which you have many questions – questions such as the following:
• “Why do I need to validate data for Workday?”
• “How do I validate data for my entire population?”
• “Does data validation have to be a manual process?”
• “How do I validate all of my data when I only have a week?”
• “How can I ask my team to validate data when they are already overwhelmed?”
By leveraging the learnings of our Workday experts, and following their recommended data practices, you can find answers to your questions, ease your anxiety and stress, and minimize your rework costs.
What is Data Validation?
During a Workday HCM implementation, data is loaded into a Workday tenant for each build. Once the data is loaded, the client must review the information for completeness and accuracy. For each iterative build, the objective is to verify that the data in Workday matches the files that were built from data extracted from the legacy systems. This iterative process ensures that the data in Workday is as clean as possible when the tenant is moved to production and available to employees and managers.
Best Practices for Data Validation
• Plan and prepare for data validation in advance
• Use an automated and repeatable data validation process
• Validate 100% of your population
• Identify and track data discrepancies
• Correct data in the source system as soon as practical
• Assign a responsible data owner for source system updates
Enabling Data Validation
Successful data validation is enabled by a rigorous and repeatable data conversion process. Follow the recommendations below to maintain a tight and complete data conversion process and shorten each tenant build timeline over the course of your Workday deployment.
Steps for a clean data conversion:
• Pull new legacy data files
• Update mapping documents
• Build clean data conversion files
• Load data conversion files to the Workday tenant
• Validate data
Common Issues with Data Validation
There are data validation issues that are consistent across clients. We have provided a few examples and potential causes below.
In Legacy Data – not in Workday: Review the date selection and other criteria for included records in your legacy data pull. You may be looking for someone in Workday who was not pulled due to selection constraints.
Alternately, the data you are looking for may have been deliberately excluded from the data conversion. If data is known to be out-of-date, or incorrect, your organization may have intentionally chosen to exclude that information. A good example of this is emergency contact data. Oftentimes, emergency contacts are entered once in the legacy system, and then never updated. Your Workday deployment provides an opportunity to refresh this data.
In Workday – not in Legacy Data: Workday contains data structures that may not exist in your legacy system. Review your mapping documents to determine how legacy data elements were moved into Workday. Oftentimes, multiple legacy data values will be used to populate one value in Workday.
For example, during design sessions it is decided that the organization type of Department will be derived from the legacy data values of Line of Business and Profit Center i.e. legacy data Line of Business is “ABC”, legacy data Profit Center is “123” and Workday Department is “Real Estate”. When doing data validation, it is discovered that Workday has a field, Department, and legacy data does not. This is when you must take into consideration the two values that are used to derive the new Workday value.
Different in Legacy Data and Workday: There are several reasons that data in Workday and data in legacy systems do not match. Data in Workday could have been converted incorrectly, meaning that the wrong legacy data was populated into the Workday data conversion file. Another possibility is that the data was manually manipulated in the files given to the data conversion consultant. Typically, this is done to update data that may not be easy to update in legacy systems. A third possibility is that the legacy data was either mapped incorrectly or was not updated. If a new legacy value is added and not communicated to the data conversion team, a mapping will not exist, potentially leading to unexpected or blank values in Workday.
In a Nutshell…
By following our recommended practices, learned by our consultants through many years of implementation experience, you can streamline your process, improve your data quality, and establish a blueprint for continuous improvement as you execute each iterative data validation cycle.
How Intrinus Consulting Partners Can Help
Leveraging our Data Services, we can work beside you throughout the data validation process and can provide the assistance necessary to keep the process moving forward to a successful completion. We have proprietary tools which will take your legacy data files, your Workday data conversion files, and reports from the Workday tenant and compare values for 100% of your population in an automated fashion. The reports from these tools pinpoint where you have data validation errors. We can also work with you to determine what is causing these errors and how to fix them. We are eager to remove the stress and anxiety from your data validation process. Please contact us at ondemand@intrinusconsulting.com to learn how we can help you!