Managing Workday security: Top Challenges

Workday’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Human Capital Management (HCM) solution is one of the most effective in terms of productivity and efficiency. Workday can yield high returns; if implemented properly. Many Human Resource Managers find it difficult to achieve the ROI of HCM that they had initially intended. Almost 92% of companies have seen their HCM solution perform poorly and one of the most common causes is Workday Security and its scalability

An Implementing issue for many large enterprises that employ Workday face are common. Therefore, here we have discussed some of the challenges with Workday Security, as well as some Workday Security best practices to tackle the problem.

1. Choosing the Right Implementation Partner

Rollouts of Workday are expected to be faster and more iterative than those of other ERPs Since Workday impacts major employee processes within an organisation, finding the right implementation partner can be challenging.  Picking the right one becomes a challenge that costs companies a lot of time, money and effort. The alternative to this i.e carrying it out in-house is not an option either. The reconfigurability element with Workday can pose an obstacle for most organisations.

2. Managing the existing HR Practices & Processes

There are a wide variety of practices associated with payroll, employee benefits, leave management, and any other function under HR, which poses a problem with Workday’s default settings. The defaults may not correspond with your way of running the vertical, which will require changing the configuration of the software. If you haven’t budgeted for this expense, your budgets will have to be dramatically increased. Even if you’ve budgeted for such a surge in the cost, the time to go live gets extended due to multiple customizations and frequent testing by creating your own scripts.

3. Poor Documentation

It is evident from the example above that Workday implementation is quite difficult and involves multiple steps and many customization options. As a result of the complexity, comprehensive documentation is vital at every stage of the implementation. This would result in inconvenience during testing, future change management, onboarding, and training. One crucial part of the documentation is the SOP, which describes how Workday should be used and under what conditions.

4. Overcoming the challenges faced during the testing period.

There are five main steps in the Workday deployment model: Planning, Architecture and Build, Configuration Prototype, Reconfiguration (if necessary), Testing, and Final deployment. For large software tools like Workday and Salesforce, the testing process can be complicated and long, which requires exhaustive planning. For multiple screening scenarios, it’s critical you have high-level plans in place run by experts with technical skills who can also see the situation from the perspective of end users.

5. Managing updates during Implementation

Large enterprises can usually achieve time-to-production in about 4-6 months, which is certainly acceptable for organisations of that size. However, Workday announces two major updates annually, and that number is probably going to increase. You may need to accommodate 1-2 of these updates during or just after the launch. In this case, your initial metrics may suffer, especially if integrations are still in process.

6. Data Migration  

Data migration and conversion is a daunting task with any enterprise software. When it comes to Workday, the problem lies with matching your existing data format with that of the application. In this process, a number of issues would be identified that can delay your project:

• Incorrect data and/or missing information
• Duplicated data that needs to be cleaned up
• Data points that might not be recognized in Workday

The idea of Workday implementation may seem daunting. Keep in mind, a successful implementation isn’t about going live on time. It is a dynamic process that continues even after the user onboarding phase. At this point, the focus should remain on the effective adoption of Workday. Once this is mastered, the plan is then diligently followed and the execution becomes effortless. UHO Workday Security services provides insights into Workday Security best practices and how to overcome Workday security challenges, and is one of the fastest-growing Digital Adoption Solutions. We specialise in helping people maximise the potential of their software.