Category: News

Intecrowd’s Workday System Maintenance Guide + Annual Calendar 2024

Your Partner in Seamless Workday Management

Intecrowd offers a streamlined approach to ensuring your Workday environment operates flawlessly year-round. Here’s a comprehensive checklist and calendar for essential maintenance tasks, empowering your team to stay proactive and efficient.

Integration Maintenance

• Schedule updates for new vendors or retiring old processes.
• Validate and update expiring scheduled processes and keys (SSH/PGP).

Intecrowd Insight: Stay ahead with our tailored integration optimization strategies to prevent downtime.

Organizational Structure Maintenance

• Deactivate inactive organizations.
• Add new structures to hierarchies.
• Manage open positions without active requisitions.

Tip from Intecrowd Experts: Regular audits keep organizational data clean and actionable.

Annual Calendar Updates

• Update Holiday and Work Schedules.
• Manage Absence Balances (carry-overs, overrides).
• Ensure forward accruals for Payroll Accounting.

Intecrowd Edge: Our consultants guide you through seamless calendar and policy adjustments.

Specialized Functional Maintenance

• Recruiting: Refresh evergreen requisitions for optimal talent pipelines.
• Payroll: Update earning/deduction limits ahead of new payroll cycles.
• Learning: Update compliance course schedules.

Why Choose Intecrowd? We provide expert support for every Workday module, ensuring smooth transitions.

Year-End System Checklist

• Execute tasks in your Sandbox environment first.
• Document all configurations for replicable results.
• Engage SMEs for testing before deploying in production.

Reminder: The payroll year typically starts before January 1—plan ahead!

Looking Ahead with Intecrowd

Whether it’s ensuring compliance, optimizing performance, or future-proofing your Workday environment, Intecrowd is here to elevate your results.

Contact Us

For personalized assistance or to learn more, please reach out to support@intecrowd.com or visit our website.

Mastering Workday Orchestrate: Streamline Integration with Efficiency and Flexibility

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, organizations increasingly seek ways to simplify complex integration workflows within their Workday environment. Workday Orchestrate, a powerful tool within the Workday platform, has emerged as a solution that balances ease of use with advanced capabilities, allowing businesses to unify data flows, reduce reliance on IT, and streamline automation. Here, we delve into some of the standout features and considerations that make Workday Orchestrate a game-changer in the realm of integration.

Visual Integration with Workday Orchestrate

Workday Orchestrate’s visual interface allows for a straightforward and more accessible approach to complex integrations. This low-code platform supports drag-and-drop capabilities, allowing both technical and non-technical users to build workflows that suit their business needs. It’s particularly effective for organizations looking to reduce technical debt and democratize integration processes across teams.

Automating Business Processes

Automating repetitive tasks is one of the primary benefits of Workday Orchestrate. With orchestration, businesses can set up workflows that automate data flow across systems, simplifying both inbound and outbound integration processes. The system can trigger workflows based on pre-defined business events or schedule them to run at specific intervals, making it possible to automate processes without manual intervention.

For instance, orchestrations can be configured to trigger upon specific business events, such as the hiring of a new employee or the completion of a financial transaction. The orchestration seamlessly connects Workday data with other systems, ensuring that actions are completed and information is synchronized automatically.

Leveraging Subprocesses for Cohesive Workflow Design

For organizations dealing with intricate workflows or multiple dependencies, Workday Orchestrate offers the ability to create and utilize subprocesses. Subprocesses allow users to break down large, complex workflows into manageable, repeatable components. This not only enhances readability and maintains a cleaner layout but also ensures more efficient troubleshooting and optimization.

Subprocesses can be used within the same integration app, facilitating consistency across multiple orchestrations. For example, if you frequently make API calls, you can build a reusable subprocess for this purpose, passing in different parameters for each instance. This modular approach helps to streamline the orchestration process and maintain an organized and scalable setup.

Debugging and Change Detection

Although debugging in orchestrations is not yet as robust as in Workday Studio, it is under development and expected to become available in the future. Until then, creating log files is a useful workaround for troubleshooting. Furthermore, orchestration allows for change detection by using the Workday Report-as-a-Service (RaaS) and Data Initialization Service (DIS) capabilities. By setting up these parameters within orchestration, you can monitor for specific data changes, enabling dynamic workflow adjustments as needed.

Transitioning from Workday Studio to Orchestrate

Workday Orchestrate does not replace Workday Studio but offers an alternative for new integrations or updates to existing ones. If a Studio integration requires major updates or significant maintenance, it may be worth considering rebuilding it as an orchestration for better future compatibility and ease of use. However, there is no need to convert existing Studio integrations that continue to meet business requirements, as Workday has indicated continued support for Studio.

Scheduling and Manual Execution Options

Orchestrations built using Workday Orchestrate for Integration can be scheduled to run at specific times, similar to other Workday integration systems. However, orchestration types exclusive to Workday Extend do not yet support scheduling, which has led many users to rely on Studio integrations for time-sensitive automation before Integration Orchestrations became available. By setting schedules for integration orchestrations, users can automate complex workflows based on regular timelines, reducing manual intervention.

Conclusion

Workday Orchestrate is an indispensable tool for any organization looking to automate workflows, improve integration management, and decrease technical complexity. Its features promote efficiency, minimize the need for custom code, and foster a scalable, low-maintenance integration environment. With the ability to create and reuse components across orchestrations, businesses can save significant time and resources, ensuring that integrations are both adaptable and resilient to change. For those seeking a more effective, visually cohesive, and customizable approach to integration, Workday Orchestrate is an essential solution in the Workday suite.

For more detailed information or specific questions, feel free to reach out to us at success@intecrowd.com.

Leveraging Workday’s Tools for Talent Optimization

As organizations strive to optimize their talent management processes, Workday provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to enhance career development and employee engagement. In this blog post, we’ll explore how these tools, such as Career Hub, Opportunity Marketplace, Flex Teams, and the Manager’s Insight Hub, can transform your approach to talent management.

Skills Matching for Efficient Candidate Selection

Workday’s skills matching feature allows you to streamline the candidate selection process by comparing the skills entered during the job application with those required by the job requisition. This enables recruiters to add candidates to a grid to see if they are a good match, highlighting which skills align with the job profile and which do not. For high-volume requisitions, this functionality helps narrow down the candidate pool, focusing on those who are most closely matched to the opportunity.

Career Development Tools

Career Hub

Career Hub empowers workers by helping them discover career development opportunities that align with their skills and interests. Whether they are seeking mentorship, learning opportunities, or new roles within the organization, Career Hub provides a platform for planning their next career steps. Flex Team opportunities, which are shorter-term commitments, allow employees to gain additional skills and support organizational projects without requiring a full-time role change.

Opportunity Marketplace

Opportunity Marketplace consolidates mobility and career development options, making it easier for employees to identify internal postings and Flex Team opportunities. By answering a few questions about their skills and career aspirations, employees can leverage Workday’s machine-learning capabilities to find opportunities that match their profile. This promotes internal mobility and career growth within the organization.

Manager’s Insight Hub

Managers play a critical role in identifying and developing talent. Workday’s Manager’s Insight Hub provides managers with machine learning-driven recommendations for career development and growth opportunities for their team members. This includes mentorship opportunities, suggested learning paths, and potential Flex Team roles. The insights are customizable based on the organization’s configuration, ensuring that managers have access to relevant information to support their employees’ career progression.

Reporting and Analytics

Workday’s robust reporting capabilities allow organizations to track and analyze various talent and performance metrics. Skills can be included in custom reports, enabling HR to identify potential successors for key positions, create succession plans, and manage Flex Team opportunities. These insights help organizations prepare for the future by identifying skills gaps and developing internal training resources or recruitment plans to address them.

Summary

Talent optimization with Workday’s tools fosters a culture of employee engagement by enabling employees and managers to support career growth and development. By leveraging skills and Workday’s machine learning, organizations can identify mentorship opportunities, create development plans, and ensure career mobility. These tools also help in identifying successors for critical positions and addressing skills gaps through targeted training or external recruitment.

Q&A Highlights

Competencies vs. Skills Organizations can use both skills and competencies in Workday. Skills are typically more specific to the employee, while competencies often encompass broader knowledge and behaviors required for specific jobs.

Skills Cloud in Talent Reviews Skills Cloud can be integrated into talent reviews, allowing employees to select and showcase their skills within the review process.

Flex Teams Usage Flex Teams, formerly known as gigs, offer employees short-term project opportunities, helping them develop new skills while contributing to different organizational areas.

Selling the Concept of Skills to Hesitant Organizations To address concerns about self-identified skills, organizations can use Workday’s feedback tool to request peer assessments of skills, providing a more balanced view of an employee’s capabilities.

Conclusion

By utilizing Workday’s comprehensive suite of talent optimization tools, organizations can enhance their talent management processes, supporting career growth and development, identifying skill gaps, and preparing for future needs. For more detailed information or specific questions, feel free to reach out to us at success@intecrowd.com. We look forward to continuing our partnership in optimizing your talent strategies.

The Intecrowd team attended Workday Altitude, in Nashville. At Altitude, Intecrowd was recognized for two of the seven awards presented to Workday partners: the Partner Collaboration Award (for MITRE), and a Product Lead of the Year Award (for U.S. Payroll).

At Workday Altitude 2022, Char Hillmann, U.S. Payroll Product Lead, was awarded “the” Product Lead of the Year Award. Char has been with Intecrowd for 4 years and has 25+ years of Payroll process and technology technical knowledge. Char is certified in PATT, HCM, Benefits, Core, and Advanced Compensation, which allows her to understand the touchpoints to Payroll and better serve her implementation and AMS customers.

This is the second year in a row Intecrowd has been awarded Product Lead of the Year Award. Last year, Liz Adams won this Award for Reporting.

Workday’s fall release will come out the weekend of September 10-11, 2022. A few exciting changes are in the works with this round of planned updates – including a brand-new look for their homepage!

Some of the more significant updates you will notice include:

• The apps are moving! Rather than taking up the bulk of the space on the homepage, you’ll now find all the apps (sometimes called “worklets”) you regularly use in the new “Global Navigation Menu.”
• The new “Global Navigation Menu” allows you to quickly find all your Workday apps from anywhere in Workday: The new menu operates similarly to most modern websites and allows you to access your Workday apps from anywhere in Workday (rather than having to return to the Workday homepage). You can also personalize your menu by adding and reordering apps to your preference.
• A new “Shortcuts” tab allows you to quickly access your favorite and most used tasks and reports in your Global Navigation Menu, providing even further personalization.
• A new “Timely Suggestions” section of the homepage will provide you with time-sensitive notices such as when you have a new payslip or a reminder to review your personal contact information.

In addition to the new look for the homepage and navigation updates, you’ll also notice:

• References to “Time Off” will now be renamed “Absence” on the employee’s Profile Page to better align with absence terminology across apps/worklets (e.g., the “Absence” app), tasks and reports and provide consistency across the Workday platform.

And department administrators who use Workday on a regular basis might be interested in a few other improvements, including:

• Enhanced “Workday Search” functionality: The newly redesigned search results page now allows you to save and personalize your most commonly used search categories (such as “People” and “Tasks and Reports”) to help filter search results and more quickly find what you’re looking for. Additionally, you can now find “Search Tips” – such as how to use prefixes – with helpful suggestions for narrowing down search results and locating the most relevant information.
• New “Table View” for Workday reports and tables: Continuing to improve the accessibility and usability of Workday reports and tables, especially for those who use assistive technologies, Workday will now automatically default to the “Table View” option (originally introduced in the March 2021 release), which spreads report and table results over several easier-to-navigate pages rather than on one result-heavy (scroll-intensive) screen; users will also be able to expand or collapse rows to better control how information is displayed in reports and tables, as well as highlight a row for easier review of data. You can always select “All” in the “Items per page” field at the bottom of a report or table to view all the data on one screen.