Workday Tutorial

Workday Tutorial: An Ultimate Guide For Beginners

Are you in search of the best material to gain a complete glance of Workday software? Well, you have arrived at the right place! This Workday tutorial has been designed to cover major concepts of this popular software solution. Workday is a cloud-based software suite that offers advanced solutions for Human Capital Management (HCM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Financial Management, Application Integrations and much more.

Workday has become one of the widely deployed software by global organizations because of its unmatched capabilities to manage ever-growing business requirements. It offers unique solutions to effectively manage core areas of business and streamlines the workflows. By the end of this Workday tutorial, you will walk away with a detailed overview of what is Workday, how it works, Workday architecture, product offerings, advantages and much more. Without wasting much time let’s get into the Workday tutorial part.

Following are the concepts covered in this Workday Tutorial:

Table of Contents

What is Workday?

Workday is a cloud-based software vendor that offers specialized applications for human capital management (HCM) financial management, and enterprise resource management (ERP). It works as a centralized software to assist you with advanced features such as payroll management, human resource management, time tracking, data analysis and much more. Workday acts as a unified platform for interacting and managing multiple business operations and drives business growth.

Workday has got better functionalities than most of the ERP systems because it acts as a centralized cloud platform for financials and HCM. It provides advanced business intelligence and integration services across the business areas. Workday has been continually evolving to new heights by adding new product lines such as Workday Student, Workday Recruiting, Workday Learning, etc to streamline various business challenges.

Workday History

Workday was founded in March 2005 by David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. It is an on-demand cloud-based Human Capital Management and Financial management software vendor. In October 2012, Workday launched its IPO. So far Workday has acquired 15+ companies.

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Workday Architecture

Workday architecture majorly works based on the four core services which include, OMS, User Interface, Integration, and Persistence. Today’s Workday architecture may be a bit complex to understand, but the following image gives you a clear glance of Workday Architecture.

Let’s have a brief overview of each Workday architecture component:

Object Management Services (OMS)

Object Management Service is a cluster of services that serves as an in-memory database. It also facilitates hosting for business logic for all Workday applications. OSM also provides a runtime environment for XpressO which is an application programming language helpful for implementing Workday business logic. The OSM cluster is implemented in Java and runs within Apache Tomcat. OMS works closely with the Analytics service.

Persistence Services

Persistence Services offers a NoSQL database for documents and a SQL database for business objects. The OSM loads all business objects into the SQL database while starting and once it starts functioning it does not rely anymore on the SQL database. OSM uses few tables and treats SQL as a key-value store. Though the SQL database performs limited tasks at runtime, it plays a major role in backup and restoring data.

UI Services Support

Workday comes with an advanced User Interface (UI) that supports a wide range of mobile and browser-based clients. Workday UI is rendered using javascript widgets and HTML.

Integration Services

Workday allows easy integrations with multiple applications used by an organization. This seamless integration process allows the organizations to share the data stored in the Workday with many other systems by users.

Users can design and build customized integrations in an isolated, secure and supervised environment. Workday also offers multiple pre-built connectors and data transformations for building custom integrations.

Deployment tools

Workday offers a wide range of deployment features to simplify the way for the customers when they migrate their legacy systems into Workday. It consists of various deployment tools that are useful when adopting new Workday products.

Analytics

Using enterprise analytics and reporting in Workday you will get a centralized source to understand the insights of the data. Workday analytics helps business in identifying risks, discovering trends, finding new opportunities, and aligning with market trends.

Workday Modules

Workday offers a wide range of products in order to meet the ever-evolving modern requirements of businesses. Following are the key offerings of Workday:

  • Workday Human capital management (HCM)
  • Workday Financial Management
  • Workday Studio
  • Workday Enterprise Planning
  • Workday Analytics

Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) Suite:

Workday HCM delivers its services from the cloud. It presents the organizations with all the required information to make quick and meaningful business decisions. Workday HCM is a widely deployed global enterprise application that acts as a single stop solution for human resources, recruitment, talent management, benefits, attendance, and payroll.

Following are the key offerings of Workday HCM:

  • Human Resource Management
  • Recruiting
  • Talent Management
  • Learning
  • Benefits
  • Payroll solutions
  • Time & Absence

Let’s discuss all the key product areas of HCM:

1) Workday Human Resource Management:

Workday HCM is a Human Capital Management software application that offers you intuitive, self-service capabilities to manage, staff and pay your global workforce. It allows you to align with global as well as local policies for managing the workforce.

Workday HCM offers flexibility and easily aligns with changing business requirements. It also helps you in managing compensation across different teams, and geographies.

2) Workday Recruiting:

Workday Recruiting helps organizations in finding and acquiring the right talent across the globe. It offers the hiring teams greater visibility into the talent acquisition process.

It provides a positive environment where teams can collaborate and accelerate the hiring process.

3) Workday Talent Management:

Effective management of human resources is very critical for the success of the business. Workday Talent management offers you a wide range of tools to manage, reward, and motivate people. Workday Goal management helps employees to clearly see and understand business goals and motivates them in contributing their part towards the success of organizations.

It also offers many other features like Performance Management to gain real-time insights into employee performance, Success Planning for identifying and organizing the best talent across the organization, and career development tools to provide rights insights for the employees to grow in their career.

4) Workday Learning:

Workday Learning is a new approach for the overall development of an employee by delivering on-demand, relevant and personalized resources to the candidates. Workday learning provides a centralized intuitive application for peer learning, professional development and essential training. It streamlines the learning process and engages them with learning curves.

5) Workday Payroll:

Workday Payroll has been designed in a way to address enterprise payroll needs. This flexible application provides the organizations with complete control over the payroll process, data and costs. It acts as a powerful calculation engine and supports more pay runs and pay groups.

Workday payroll offers high-security features which allow outside partners to run and view payroll results. This also allows the users to conduct analysis on payroll data and allows unlimited reports generation on data.

6) Workday Benefits Administration:

Workday Benefits Administration solutions offer organizations with high flexibility to define, manage, and adjust benefits plans based on the unique needs of businesses. The Workday Benefit administration lets you easily manage health, spending accounts, insurance, health savings accounts, flex plans, retirement plans, and more from a centralized system.

7) Time & Absence:

Workday Time tracking works in collaboration with Workday HCM, Project Management, and Payroll to provide a clear view of employee time & absence tracking. It streamlines the process for employees to check-in and out or enter time using a web browser or mobile device.

Workday Time & Absence Management solution allows employees and managers to easily track time off, leave requests, accruals and balances all from a centralized and user-friendly location. Its simplified working style allows organizations in minimizing expenses and maximizing worker productivity.

Workday Financial Management

Workday Financial management delivers its services from the cloud and offers a bundle of features to fulfil the modern financial management requirements of organizations. This modern solution goes beyond financial management and helps organizations achieve improved financial consolidation, greater visibility into insights, achieve internal control, and bringing consistency across global operations.

Workday Financial Management works as a centralized system to support transaction processing, consolidation, multidimensional reporting, meeting global finance requirements from desktop or user-friendly mobile devices.

Let’s discuss all the key product areas of Workday Finance:

1) Workday Accounting and Finance:

The Workday Accounting & Finance solution lets you eliminate the work associated with traditional ways of bookkeeping and presents you with advanced automatic solutions to manage the financial transactions of your organizations. It offers multi-element, multi-currency, and multibook capabilities to help effectively managing global finance transactions

2) Workday Revenue Management:

Workday Revenue Management offers complete visibility of your customers and allows you to manage the entire revenue lifecycle. It allows the business to easily integrate with any CRM systems and configure billing schedules, contract management, revenue recognition and much more to drive business in a profitable way by meeting customer standards.

3) Management Reporting:

Workday Finance Reporting brings all your financial data into a single secured place. It presents businesses with accurate reports on everything from internal reports to external regulatory statements using this centralized solution. Workday management reporting lets you analyze and bring out financial insights in minutes.

4) Procurement:

Workday Procurement acts as a one-stop solution to manage spendings on goods and services. It provides a centralized system using which organizations can easily manage all the tasks ranging from sourcing goods to process payment.

5) Inventory:

Workday Inventory management streamlines the process to manage the end to the end life cycle of inventory management of organizations. This solution makes it easier to stock, track and maintain required goods. It gives complete visibility of the supply chain.

6) Projects Management:

The Workday Project Management solution seamlessly integrates HCM, Financials, time tracking and many other solutions into a unified system. It allows the teams to quickly have access to areas like essential project details, budgeting, stock in demand, utilization, cost reports, etc. It also streamlines and automates the process of the contract-to-cash cycle.

7) Grant Management:

Managing grants of an organization are one of the complex tasks. But the Workday Grant tracking solution makes it far simpler for organizations. It helps organizations to meet organizational and grantor requirements for accounting, budgeting, restoring, billing and compliance.

Workday Studio

Workday is an advanced Eclipse-based integration tool that enables customers to build customized integration to and from the Workday platform. It allows its users and third-party customers to handle, manage, and troubleshoot complex integrations running on a Workday cloud platform. Workday studio performs advanced functionalities than a simple EIB.

Workday Enterprise Planning

Workday Enterprise Planning equips the organizations with the power to plan every scenario and ready to align with changes. Using Workday Adaptive Planning helps organizations in collaborating teams across various functionalities, geographies and industries. Workday Enterprise Planning comes with a powerful engine that is intelligent, flexible, and easily scalable.

Workday Analytics

Workday Analytics allows the business to gain a complete view of the workforce, financial health, identify opportunities and risks, discover trends, and dig deeper into contributing factors. It consolidates the business information and provides you with the right insights to make more informed decisions.

What is a Workday Tenant?

A tenant is defined as any application that needs its own secure computing environment. In the Workday platform, a tenant is a unique instance that holds a specific set of data in a logical manner. In simple terms, a tenant is like a database environment.

Each Workday user will have their own tenant and they can only access it. If a user makes any modifications to the system through configuration, these changes will not reflect in anyone’s system except on their own.

Types of Tenants in Workday:

Workday comes with 7 different types of tenants:

  • Production
  • Sandbox
  • Sandbox Preview
  • Implementation
  • Implementation Preview
  • Development
  • Implementation Customer Central

What is Multi-tenancy?

Multi-tenancy is an advanced feature offered by Workday which allows its customers to explore the Workday platform fully using a single application server. Each Workday user tenant is logically separated with their own configuration and data but physically connected to the same operating system. Multi-tenancy saves a lot of expenditures by consolidating IT resources and provides high security for individual tenants security.

Workday Features

The following tables show the different features offered by Workday Software:

Time Tracking

Goal Management

Career and development planning

Recruiting tools

Succession planning

Global payroll tools

Strategic workforce planning

Workday Big Data Analytics integration

Business assets

Workforce analytics

Operational headcount planning

Grants management

Revenue management

Expenses

Purchase orders

Real-time spend analytics

Manage your asset roster

Custom reports

Project management

Payroll Solutions

Performance Management

Centralized business management

Talent Management

Career and Development Planning

Absence Management

Benefits administration

Cloud Connect for Third-Party Payroll

Organization Management

Revenue recognition

Performance management

Onboarding tools

Invoicing

Mobile friendly

Procurement

Accounting and finance

Management reporting

Automatically reconcile bank statements

Online support

Workday Advantages

Following are the list of advantages of using Workday:

  • Provides 24/7 access to data in a secured way.
  • Allows easy access to the common areas
  • Gives clear information of teams to manager, administrators and executes.
  • Provides advanced features for managing finances
  • Supports advanced auditing features
  • Supports multiple integrations

Closing Thoughts

Workday has witnessed massive growth over the past few years due to its unique offerings to fulfil the modern requirements of organizations. In order to meet the ever-increasing business needs and to sustain in this competitive market Workday is constantly adding new features to its product base. Hope you found this Workday tutorial interesting. You can also check out our Workday Interview questions. Happy learning!

Author Bio

Yamuna
Yamuna

Yamuna Karumuri is a content writer at CourseDrill. Her passion lies in writing articles on the IT platforms including Machine learning, Workday, Sailpoint, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Selenium, MSBI, and so on. You can connect with her via LinkedIn.

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