PRODUCT INFORMATION:

Vendor: Workday

Release Date: 2005

PRODUCT MARKET FIT:

501-10,000+ Employees

$100M-20B+ Revenue

 

DEPLOYMENT:

✅ Cloud

❌ On-Premise

CUSTOMERS:

700+

WHAT IS WORKDAY ERP?

Workday is an American software vendor that develops financial management, spend management and human capital management Cloud ERP software of the same name. Initially the solution targeted only the human capital management (HCM) space but has acquired and developed more functionality, turning it into a wider set of tools and is now commonly referred to as an ERP system. 

With its roots in human capital management, Workdays unique selling point as an ERP system is its focus on people and tight integration between business functions. As a result, the solution is known for its ease of use and its people centric approach, ranging from the solution capabilities through to the Workday corporate identity and corporate social responsibility. 

Workday is a young solution but in a short space of time, it has quickly become very popular and won over large enterprise customers from other enterprise software vendors such as SAP, Oracle & Microsoft. Today, Workday customers include many of the Fortune 1000 and the company is also known to have a very high implementation success rate. Due to the popularity of Workday however, the market for Workday consultants and talent has become somewhat constricted so fame and fortune has certainly come at a price. 

The functionality offered by Workday ERP started with people centric processes and business functions, but has now developed to include financial management, spend management, business analytics and integration. However, the solution is still lacking in many supply chain related areas and in supply chain focussed industries such as manufacturing, distribution and so on, it tends to lose out to mature competitors such as Oracle, SAP & Microsoft or niche players. As such, Workday ERP has seen most of its success in people and project centric organizations, including professional services, creative industries, high tech, healthcare and more. With that said, many organizations with heavy supply chain processes still use Workday for its human capital management functionality, rather than as an end to end ERP solution. According to the official Workday website, customers include organizations such as Accenture, Aldi, Levi & Strauss, Airbus, Puma, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Comcast and many more. 

Furthermore, Workday customers do tend to be on the larger side, typically with a minimum of 500 employees and as such there can be a significant cost barrier to entry.

  • FUNCTIONALITY & MODULES

  • PROS & CONS

  • INDUSTRY FIT

  • HISTORY

  • DEPLOYMENT

Modules & Features List

Financial Management & Accounting

Workday offers financial management and accounting capabilities which include:

  • Accounts receivable
  • Accounts payable
  • General ledger
  • Fixed assets
  • Financial consolidation 
  • Revenue management
  • Intercompany financials
  • Budgeting
  • Multichart of accounts
  • Multi-GAAP
  • Global Tax Engine
  • Fixed Assets

Financial management within Workday offers an intuitive experience for managing disparate organizations. Workday allows for multi-entity, multilanguage and multibook operations providing analytics and transactional drill down for accounting analysis. The solution allows global organizations to meet reporting and regulatory compliance plus offers many opportunities for automation.

Workday leverages machine learning across the platform, but particularly in finance to enable your organization to automate financial management processes. For example, financial closing can be accelerated with anomaly detection.

Workday finance also provides easy to use tools for audit, allowing you to track and log changes within the system by user. These tools are natively built into the application. 

Finance users can also easily integrate with several bank accounts and perform simple accounts reconcilliations processes. 

 

Read More >>>

 

Spend Management

Workday Spend Management comprises of four key areas:

  • Strategic sourcing
  • Procure to pay
  • Inventory
  • Expenses Management

Workday strategic sourcing allows you to launch sourcing events across your business easily using forms capabilities and allows for you to quickly launch RFI, RFP and RFQ processes. These includes sourcing questionnaires and pricing sheets, enabling you to easily collaborate with suppliers.

You can also use reverse auctions and the ability to manage your contracts in one single location. This allows you to automate purchase order creation and more.

Workday procure to pay allows for easy management of your organizations indirect spend.  This gives your suppliers their own portal into your system, allowing them to see their open and closed purchase orders plus open RFI, RFP & RFQs. Your suppliers can also settle their own paperwork, automating your invoicing processes.

Purchasing

The Purchasing module manages the whole purchasing process, from requisition to receipt regardless of purchase type, whether this is for materials, services or capital items.


Requisition quotes can be generated through the browser by employees across the whole of the organization, or limited based on approvals, and similar rules can be generated to ensure purchase approvals are based on a pre-defined hierarchy. Once a quote has been received, approvals can given to authorize and create a purchase order online. The entirety of the purchasing process is moved online, automated and maintained through a number of system-generated notifications and alerts through the workflow.


As Purchasing is integrated with the other modules, expenses that are project related can quickly be coded, ensuring that the entirety of projects costs are understood and applied and can be compared against the budgeted costs at all times. The module automatically creates accounts payable transactions, updating the general ledger.

Workday Pros & Cons

Pros:

  • Wide and deep functionality across many key business areas.
  • Heavily designed for the Professional services and project based organizations.
  • Enables in depth project based analysis on financials, performance, utilization and revenue.
  • Supports the launch of targeted marketing campaigns for organizations who need to win project work.
  • Automates many aspects of the proposal process.

Cons:

  • Not suitable for organizations that are outside the Professional Services / project driven environments.
  • All modules come as standard and pricing is based on this, so pricey for those who do not require all the functionality provided by the modules.

Industry Fit

Workday is used by companies in various industries, including:

Professional Services

High Tech & Software

Gaming

Legal & Law Firms

History

Workday was formed by former executives from Oracle Peoplesoft in 2005. The product was launched in 2006, initially only providing human resources management capabilities. It soon started to also provider wider capabilities including financial management. Workday has made a number of acquisitions including ScoutRFP, Peakon, Adaptive Insights, VNDLY and more which augment its human resources management, procurement, financial management and accounting as well as analytics capabilities. Workday IPO'd in 2012.

Workday Deployment Options

Workday is offered only as a Cloud ERP solution, in a true Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Workday ERP includes all software licensing, maintenance and hosting in one subscription cost which is predominantly based on user licenses.

Workday cannot be purchased as a perpetual license or On-Premise solution.

Learn about Workday implementation here.

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Workday Implementation

Implementation of Workday ERP is carried out by its own services organization, but increasingly by its partner ecosystem, including companies such as Deloitte, PwC, IBM, Accenture, CapGemini, DXC Technology, and NGA Human Resources plus many more. Workday claims that over 70% of customers go-live on average and every customer recieves Workday 'delivery assurance' which ensures a tri-party engagement between Workday, your implementation partner and customer. With this offering, Workday maintains touch points throughout the implementation process, overseeing and guiding planning, configuration, testing and deployment.

Workday APIs (Application Programming Interface)

Service Description
ACA_Partner_Integrations The ACA Partner Integrations Web Service provides Federal and State reporting operations for ACA partners and vendor integrations that report customer ACA data 
Absence_Management The Absence Management Web Service contains operations that expose absence-related data, including Employee Time Off and Absence Inputs for time off and accrual adjustments and overrides, and Leave Requests, in Workday Human Capital Management Business Services. 
Academic_Advising Web Service for retrieving objects related to Academic Advising, such as Student Academic Requirement Assignments. 
Academic_Foundation Public Web Service for creating, editing and retrieving the foundational objects for the Student System, such as Programs of Study, Educational Institutions, and other other objects with cross-module uses. 
Admissions Web Service for creating, editing and retrieving objects related to Admissions, such as Applicants. 
Adoption Adoption Web Service Operations. 
Benefits_Administration The Benefits Administration Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Human Capital Management Business Services benefits-related data. 
Campus_Engagement Public Web Service for creating, editing and retrieving objects related to planning and organizing communication between Student Prospects and Recruiters. 
Cash_Management The Cash Management Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Financials Cash Management data. It includes data relative to Banking. 
Compensation The Compensation Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Human Capital Management Business Services compensation-related data. 
Compensation_Review The Compensation Review Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Human Capital Management Business Services compensation review related data. 
Drive Public Web Services for Drive 
Dynamic_Document_Generation Web service for creating, editing and retrieving objects related to Document Templates, such as Text Blocks and Text Block Categories. 
External_Integrations The External Integrations Web Service provides an operation that informs external systems of Integration Events that have been triggered from within Workday. The WSDL for this service provides the structure that needs to be implemented by an external system to receive event "Launch" information. 
Financial_Aid This web service is for the Financial Aid module 
Financial_Management The Financial Management Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Financials data. It includes data relative to Accounts, Accounting, Business Plans, Financial Reporting, Tax, Financial Organizations, Basic Worktags, Related Worktags and more. 
Human_Resources The Human Resources Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Human Capital Management Business Services data, including Employee, Contingent Worker and Organization information. This Web Service can be used for integration with enterprise systems including corporate directories, data analysis tools, email or other provisioning sub-systems, or any other systems needing Worker and/or Organization data. 
Identity_Management The Identity Management Web Service contains operations that relate to Workday Identity and Access Management. 
Integrations This Web Service contains operations related to all Integrations within the Workday system. 
Interview_Feedback__Do_Not_Use_ Submits Interview Feedback for Interviewers on the Interview Schedule. Also, allows you to move a candidate to the next stage of the business process. This web service is being retired in a future release. These operations are available under the Recruiting (Public) web service. 
Inventory The Inventory Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Financials Inventory data. 
Learning The Learning Web Service contains operations for creating, editing and retrieving Workday Learning related data such Courses, Course Offerings and Enrollments. 
Metadata_Translations Import Metadata Translations using EIB 
Moments Web Service for creating, editing, and retrieving objects related to Workday Moments. 
Notification The Notification Web Service provides an operation that informs external systems of business events that occur within Workday. The WSDL for this service provides the structure that needs to be implemented by an external system to receive notifications for their subscribed Workday business events. Subscriptions and Notification details (i.e. Endpoint and security information) are defined within the Workday application. 
Org_Studio Web service operations designed for the interaction with Org Studio Setup Data. 
Payroll The Workday Payroll Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Payroll data for integration with third parties (such as time and attendance). 
Payroll_CAN The Workday Payroll CAN Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Payroll CAN data for integration with third parties (such as time and attendance). 
Payroll_FRA The Workday Payroll FRA Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Payroll FRA data for integration with third parties 
Payroll_GBR The Workday Payroll GBR Web Service contains operations that expose Workday UK Payroll data for integration with third parties. 
Payroll_Interface The Payroll Interface Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Human Capital Management Business Services data for integration with external payroll systems. 
Performance_Management The Performance Management Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Employee Performance Management Business Services data. This Web Service can be used for integration with other employee performance management systems. 
Professional_Services_Automation The Professional Services Automation Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Financials Business Services data for integration with Professional Services Automation (PSA) systems. 
Recruiting The Recruiting Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Human Capital Management Business Services data for integration with Talent Management and Applicant Tracking systems. 
Resource_Management The Resource Management Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Financials Resource Management data. It includes data relative to Suppliers, Supplier Accounts, Expenses, Business Assets and Projects. 
Revenue_Management The Revenue Management Web Service contains operations that expose Workday Financials Revenue Management data. It includes data relative to Customers, Customer Accounts, Prospect and Opportunities. 
Scheduling Operations for importing and exporting scheduling data. 
Settlement_Services Web Service used for settlement management and services. 
Staffing The Staffing Web Service operations expose Workday Human Capital Management Business Services and data. These services pertain to staffing transactions for both employees and contingent workers, such as bringing employees and contingent workers on board. 
Student_Core Web Service for creating, editing and retrieving objects related to students' personal information, such as Student Documents. 
Student_Finance Web service for creating, editing and retrieving objects related to Student Finance, such as charges and payments for Students. 
Student_Records Web Service for creating, editing and retrieving objects related to Student Records, such as Student Courses, Sections etc. 
Student_Recruiting Web Service for creating, editing and retrieving objects related to Student Recruiting, such as Student Recruiting Events, Campaigns, Cycles, Recruiters, and Prospects. 
Talent This web service consists of operations for interfacing with the Workday Talent Management web service operations. 
Tenant_Data_Translation Public Web Service to export and import translatable tenant data 
Time_Tracking Operations for importing and exporting time and work schedule information. 
Workday_Connect Get and put web services used for communication capabilities across applications. 
Workday_Extensibility Public Web Service for extensibility features across applications. 
Workforce_Planning The Workforce Planning Web Service operations expose Workforce Planning Business Services and data. 

Workday ERP Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How much does Workday cost?

Workday ERP bears the typical costs of ERP implementation including software licensing, software support and ERP implementation. 

As Workday is only available as a Cloud solution, this ERP software is paid for on a subscription basis. 

Is Workday SaaS?

Workday is only provided as a Cloud ERP solution or Software-as-a-Service solution. This means that Workday ERP licensing includes the software licensing, maintenance, hosting and product support in one subscription cost.

Is Workday an ERP?

In the traditional sense, Workday doesn't include many of the typical capabilities of an ERP platform such as inventory management, supply chain, production and more. However for services focussed businesses whos main resources are people - Workday can be considered an enterprise resource planning software.

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