Consultant Diaries: Workday is about Introspect & innovate rather await
Kiran Chakravarthy
Director || Cloud Technologies || AI intellect || Enabler || Thought Leadership
"If Workday were to be a musical instrument than the certified consultants are the learned instrumentalists... "
Maybe it's not a great analogy, but I'm sure you get the flow...
On every Workday implementation, consultants are pivotal to its success. If functionality were to define business flow success than integrations are the veins of the architecture flow.
As old saying goes 'customer is king and so is their prerogative' ... it is as well very true when it comes to their requirements or requests.
"customer is king and so is their prerogative "
At times the requirements, seemingly small, just might not have any straight out-of-box solution.
whilst experts at Workday, juggle with most critical ecosystem ideas to bring them to light, so its vital for partner consultants to keep the race on & strike the balance.
Hence rather carrying a medieval mindset, I believe for a consultant it is super important to introspect on the requirement and seek innovative ways to deliver a solution from available Workday and clients toolbox.
Indeed a successful story should always blur the lines between functionality & technicality and use the best of both worlds to fulfil the need.
To share a case, one of the simplest requirement but seemingly trips many top-tier consultants is " Bank State Branch(BSB) Validation during payment elections. Workday doesn't have an out-of-box solution".
BSB is part of bank accounts (payment elections) employee self service activity. It is at times critical for downstream Payroll processing integrations to have a correct value and validated beforehand.
A solution within Workday will for sure improve downstream business efficiency and reduces manual intervention.
Customer have asked this very question - why as simple as BSB validation can't be achieved in Workday.
With combination of business process, custom objects, integrations, custom WSDL, public web services and an external API, we have achieved a working solution. It was all about bringing innovation to thinking process.
The best part is, it has logical flow. Worker enters their bank details along with BSB and on submission it triggers the validation loop.
With every Workday release, the whole experience is at stratosphere and with PAAS in perspective, for any consultant with an open mind, cloud is limitless. I'm sure you get the flow :)
Note: Consultant diaries are reflection of my experience and thinking. It doesn't imply or undermine anything and Workday safe harbour applies for forwarding looking statements. I welcome individual questions or opinions.
The solution is good but still does not solve the full problem. What we additionally have in place is another step to ping the payroll system to check if they have the BSB setup. If they do not then we send them a notification to set it up. The next will be to set it up for them... if their API allow's us to. But then for a company with 26 countries... that's 26 web services that need to be maintained. Lets sit back and think about it..... Every integration to payroll will need this. This may take around 2-3 days per country to build and test. At implementation partners rates..... around $4K per country. Workday can provide a solution just once.... just the same as what we have in SAP or PS.... it should be delivered.... shouldn't it?