Are You Leveraging These Workday Enhancements?

Live on Workday and wondering how you can get the most out of your platform? Here are four enhancements to take advantage of now.

Extend

What is it and what does it do? Workday Extend is a technology platform that enables customers to rapidly build and deploy applications that seamlessly extend their existing Workday applications and unlock new business value. Organizations can leverage Workday technology frameworks like security, object data store, business processes, orchestrations, integrations, and reporting to build new functionality for their unique business needs. Apps developed with Workday Extend are accessed from a Workday user's home screen, dashboard, or related actions—retaining the consistent, familiar user experience that comes with Workday.

Who is it geared for? Extend can be useful in many functions and roles within your organization.

Why is it awesome? Workday Extend can blend new and existing data, both internally and externally to Workday, to deliver solutions that address critical gaps and support data-informed decision-making. Workday Extend runs inside Workday and allows users to customize apps to meet specific needs, while being built in code that is update-safe. New objects and processes inherit the same secure, auditable, and resilient features expected with all Workday applications.

How does it deliver benefits? Customers that implement Workday do so to take advantage of the power of a unified solution. Extend enables you to stay within Workday while addressing unique needs of the business.

What does it look like “in action”? Common themes for Extend apps include system consolidation, agile response, internal culture initiatives, charitable giving, promotion nomination and other unique business programs. Avaap customers have also used Extend to build apps that simplify and improve efficiencies of daily tasks in Workday such as reporting, onboarding, and more. Utilizing Workday Extend will save employees time, increase usability, and create new possibilities in your organization.

Adaptive Planning

What is it and what does it do? Adaptive Planning is a financial planning and analysis tool that helps businesses streamline budgeting, planning, forecasting, and reporting. Adaptive makes it easier to collect, store, dimensionalize, aggregate, and report on planning and results. Customers using Adaptative Planning can create driver-based and trend-based financial models that are more predictive in nature.

Who is it geared for? Financial, Planning and Analysis teams, and all cost center managers that participate in the budgeting process, including position detail for salary and benefit planning.

Why is it awesome? Adaptive makes it easier to collaborate across your organization and enables you to bring more people into the process at the right level to harness greater insights. Modeling configuration makes it easy to adapt for organizational changes and dashboards provide visibility for C-level users and stakeholders.

How does it deliver benefits? By eliminating spreadsheets and acting as a single source of truth, Adaptive Planning helps to cut down on errors, while creating a seamless, more user-friendly interface for capturing budget data. Workflow (an additional feature you can add) provides functionality to route submitted budgets to a specific approval process within your organizational structure. Adaptive Planning also has a feature that publishes approved budgets to Workday Core Financials to help with things like management reporting.

What does it look like  “in action”? Adaptive planning allows you and your team to make faster decisions and see all of the downstream effects of those critical business decisions. Customers of adaptive planning have seen reduced forecasting timelines, increased speed in reporting, and more precise decision making when using adaptive planning. This results in more automation and frees up time for your employees to work on value-add activities that contribute to the business bottom line, as well as customer growth and success.

Student Journeys

What is it and what does it do? Student Journeys is a product specific to Workday Student that enables a customized experience of the student’s journey including personalized paths and home page cards to guide them through activities to view information, complete tasks, and navigate to Workday and non-Workday content. Student Journeys distributes a tailored path to a group of individuals with similar circumstances to guide them through an experience using video, PDF, MS Office documents, Workday tasks, reference links, etc. This can supplement the student’s overall experience to make incremental steps, programs, and complex processes more customized, understandable, and polished.

Who is it geared for? Any nonworker student.

Why is it awesome? Student Journeys supplements transactional events that often need more guidance, more explanation, visual representation, linkages to information outside of Workday, etc.

How does it deliver benefits? Student Journeys provides a source of noncompliance or nonmandated resources and steps that students can use to broaden their experience.

What does it look like “in action”? Journeys can be used to supplement study abroad programs. For example, a student journey path can be designed and distributed to the population of students that are studying in each country to include cultural cues, language suggestions, tasks to update Workday’s language proficiency, etc. Another example can be found in financial aid. With the new FASFA changes, you can provide a journey path to students who previously used FASFA to share key changes, references, and helpful tips, guiding them through the new process with specific Workday tasks.

Additional use cases include support to apply and prep for graduation, onboarding, change program of study, support to register for classes, request student leave of absence (LOA), support to set up payment plans, and support to withdraw from the institution.

Discovery Boards

What is it and what does it do? Discovery boards is an ad hoc reporting and analysis tool within Workday, accessible through drive. It provides drag and drop capability, allowing the end user to pull fields and data source elements in a meaningful manner to address operational questions, gain insight to trends, etc.

Who is it geared for? Reporting admins and functional or managerial workers who benefit from analysis and quick access.

Why is it awesome? The drag and drop interface is very user friendly and it saves time because you do not have to wait for someone else to extract and package the data or analysis for you.

How does it deliver benefits? Discovery boards can help your team to collaborate, answer questions quickly, and gain better insight into your data.

What does it look like "in action"? Discovery boards allow you to display reporting visualizations through various types like waterfall, heatmap, scatterplot, key performance indicator, and dual axis visualizations. Additional use cases include worker transitions, employee tenure with management levels, base pay analysis by job title, average base pay per employee, inventory levels, total price per quantity of sales items, gross margin, and operating income, expenses, or revenue.

Going live on Workday is a huge accomplishment. At Avaap, we ensure you get the most out of your Workday investment. These are just a few enhancements you can take advantage of today to improve your processes. For a more personalized assessment of how you can optimize your Workday environment, get in touch with our award-winning Workday AMS team today!