Workday Implementation Best Practices

Workday is one of the most popular and useful software suites available today. In the words of co-founder Dave Duffield: “I started Workday to bring passion and customer focus back to the business of enterprise applications.” Workday has been built to serve a diverse array of enterprise needs from day one.

There’s a wide range of applications built into the Workday platform. The main focuses revolve around finances, human resources, and lifecycle management. There are further uses for Workday as well, though—and the true value comes from uniting all these features together in one cohesive service. Here are a few of the main benefits of Workday cloud applications:

• Intentionally built as a cohesive suite – As opposed to working as several entirely independent applications, Workday’s unified approach creates further value to users and enterprises.
• Less expensive – Thanks to both being a cloud service and being a unified suite, Workday offers organizations way more bang for their buck.
• Constant upgrades – There are few enterprise cloud platforms that do as good a job of continually improving and refining their offerings as Workday.
• Realize value sooner – When done correctly, Workday can be deployed faster—allowing for faster value creation and return on investment.

No matter your organization’s intentions or motivations for adopting Workday, it’s important to ensure you correctly deploy the system. Knowing the Workday implementation best practices can be crucial to long-term success.

What Are Workday Implementation Best Practices?

No matter the project, you want to know the steps necessary in order to see it to completion. This is the mindset you’ll want to take when deploying Workday at your organization. Here are some Workday implementation best practices:

• Know how to properly integrate Workday into operations – Enterprises are only going to extract the full value from a Workday investment if they know how to align and integrate the applications within workflows and strategies.
• Understand how to leverage data – Workday provides great analytics tools that can lead to important discoveries. It’s essential these are set up correctly in order to guarantee data and its analysis are accurate. You’ll want to know all the opportunities for utilizing analytics within Workday.
• See the whole picture – It can be difficult to really understand how a full enterprise software platform is supposed to function when all pieces are working in harmony. But accomplishing this is really the ultimate goal of adopting a solution like Workday. Getting a clear picture of the macro workings is of the utmost importance.
• Keep everything current – Whether it’s simply updating the system, or configuring a new release, you’ll always want to keep Workday current. This not only increases security, it magnifies potential innovation.
• Create an implementation plan – You’re not going to have a successful Workday deployment without a guide. Formulating blueprints for short-, medium-, and long-term objectives will be key to Workday implementation.

As you can see, there are a lot of things to think about when considering Workday implementation. Without taking the steps to do things the right way, your results can end up falling well short of your expectations.

Many enterprises will find it in their best interest to work with a Workday implementation partner organization when deploying their system. This is basically a consulting firm that specializes in Workday platform implementation. While some executives might balk at the idea of hiring a company to help with the deployment of another organization’s software, this is actually a pretty common practice. Workday even has certified partners that the recommend to clients, which reinforces the idea that this is a best practice.

Workday is a powerful suite of cloud applications that can shift enterprise operations in a positive way. Knowing the best practices for Workday implementation can vastly improve the return on your investment.