In the attached article, our in-house integrations expert, Vijaya (Viji) Krishnaswamy, provides solid recommendations for Workday® customers looking to ease the process of integrating their existing systems with their Workday® solutions. As an Integrations Lead, Viji has deployed over 180 integrations for 14 Workday® clients. Overall, she has contributed to client success in key roles on over 30 different Workday® implementations.
The Workday® Integrations Imperative
Harnessing the power within Workday® is critical to your implementation success; however, it’s not the whole story. Your success is also dependent on the integration of your Workday® solution with other internal and external systems that must interoperate with Workday® to serve your enterprise’s goingforward business processing and information needs.
To ensure interoperability, you must plan, design, build, test and deploy integrations that enable business-critical data to flow accurately, seamlessly, and sometimes bi-directionally between Workday® and each of these other upstream and downstream systems. Moreover, you will need to collaborate with multiple stakeholders, align and coordinate efforts across all implementation workstreams to complete critical path integrations activities, and determine the optimal approach and tool for operationalizing each individual integration. Although this might all seem a bit overwhelming, you can succeed!
Workday® Integrations Process: Planning through Deployment
Here is an overview of the end-to-end Integrations process from a customer perspective, so you can plan ahead and be prepared to go live, on time and on budget, with integrations that ensure your data flows to where it is needed, thus extending your Workday® value throughout and beyond your enterprise.
• Collaborate with your Integrations Lead to review the integrations identified in the statement of work (SOW) and agree on a final list of in-scope integrations as follows:
o Keeping future state in mind, review the integrations listed in the SOW.
o Ensure all integrations required to bring data into and send data out of Workday® are covered.
o Add integrations that were missed during the sales process.
o Remove integrations that are no longer needed because they can be replaced by delivered Workday® functionality.
• Collaborate with your Integrations Lead to prioritize the in-scope integrations (as determined in the above step) based on the following considerations:
o Integrations that impact payroll should be considered high priorities. Examples include payroll hours import, 401K integration, payroll to general ledger integration, etc.
o Integrations that do not have workarounds are usually considered high priorities.
o Demographic integrations to benefits vendors usually range from medium to high priorities.
o Demographic integrations to downstream systems usually range from low to medium priorities.
• Identify the following stakeholders for each in-scope integration as applicable:
o Business owners / subject matter experts (SMEs)
o External vendor systems analysts
o Internal upstream and downstream systems owners
o Workday® services partner / systems integrator
• Inform all identified stakeholders of the integrations scope and timeline and request file specifications for each integration. Distribute the file specifications and any additional pertinent integrations information to the Workday® services partner.
• Coordinate with the Integrations Lead to schedule discovery sessions with all stakeholders during which requirements will be gathered for all in-scope integrations. A discovery session is a meeting, ranging from 1 to 2 hours and including representatives from each stakeholder group (partners, business owners, and vendors), during which all aspects of each integration are discussed and finalized. An effective discovery session should cover the following topics:
o File layouts and data formatting requirements
o Naming conventions
o Transfer protocols
o Testing turnaround times
o Run frequencies
o Notifications
o Data protection and security measures
o Testing and deployment schedules
• Participate in Discovery meetings, come prepared to answer all questions pertaining to the integrations for which you are responsible, and make and document business decisions to finalize integration requirements.
Include your Functional Consultant in the discovery sessions to ensure that integrations requirements are gathered in conjunction with the configuration requirements for the associated functional modules. This will help mitigate the risk of major scope changes during integrations configuration and/or testing.
• Ensure that the Workday® partner with whom you are working documents the detailed requirements gathered during discovery sessions for each in-scope integration. The resulting integrations design document will be used as the source for configuring or developing each integration.
• Review the integrations design document in detail and ensure that all critical aspects including schedule, transfer protocol, notifications, exception handling, etc. are thoroughly documented for each in-scope integration.
• Conduct a design review session with the Workday® partner, suggest integration design changes where needed, provide corrections, and ensure all integration scenarios/aspects are taken into account. Note that, while a design document is a living, breathing document, some changes might significantly impact scope; so, it is important to understand all aspects of the design.
• Provide sign-off on the integrations design document once you are satisfied with the thoroughness and accuracy of the requirements.
It is imperative that the legacy business owners/SMEs review the design document and provide sign-offs to confirm that all business scenarios are well thought out and precisely reflected in the design of each in-scope integration.
• The Workday® partner authorizes movement to the Configure stage once the design document is approved.
• Address questions that may arise during configuration and unit testing.
• Follow up with Vendors on any pending questions or concerns that need to be addressed.
• Ensure that required changes identified during the integration configuration process are incorporated into the design document and approved by the appropriate stakeholders.
• Monitor the progress of integrations configuration.
• Request and participate in knowledge transfer sessions for the in-scope integrations to acquire the thorough understanding necessary for effectively preparing and conducting integrations testing for all business scenarios.
Customers can significantly benefit from knowledge transfer sessions conducted at the end of the Configure stage because, by gaining advanced exposure to integrations configurations, they can find answers to their questions, increase their confidence levels, and improve their overall ability to detect and resolve defects during End-to-End testing.
• Determine all possible test scenarios, create test scripts, and document expected test results.
• Execute the test scenarios and/or scripts and document actual test results.
• Log defects when actual test results do not meet the requirements in the design document.
• Identify and document whether defects are configuration related and/or data related based on the error messages.
• Communicate and collaborate with the Integrations Lead to resolve configuration related issues.
• Communicate and collaborate with the Functional Leads and/or Vendor to resolve data related issues.
• Retest the failed test scenarios and ensure that the actual results meet the requirements.
• Request that your Workday® partner update the design documents for changes resulting from End-to-End testing.
• Inform all stakeholders that the integrations are ready for deployment.
• Provide required formal sign-offs and approvals to deploy the integrations to the Gold tenant.
It is a recommended practice to conduct a brief meeting to discuss and communicate to all stakeholders (partners, business owners, and vendors) the go-live preparation activities and agreed upon next steps.
• Monitor the Integration Lead’s progress in deploying the integrations.
• Validate that the final version of the approved configuration for each integration is deployed.
• Request all integrations documentation, including Transfer Protocols, from the Integration Lead.
• Inform all the stakeholders of the go-live and the schedule of the first production integration runs with Workday.
How Intrinus Consulting Partners Can Help
We can help you navigate through each and every step of the above process by applying our recommended practices, imparting knowledge on the different integration technologies and tools, assisting you as needed in key areas or stages, and automating the data flow between systems to reduce manual efforts. Please contact us at ondemand@intrinusconsulting.com to learn how we can engage as a team!
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