Workday Architecture - Introduction to Workday HCM

Workday Architecture: Table Of Content

• What is Workday?
• Why Workday?
• The Architecture of the Workday
• Workday Opportunities
• Benefits of Workday

What is Workday?

Workday is cloud-based application software, typically designed and developed to manage enterprise human capital management, resource planning, and financial management applications. Because of its multiple features, every organization, despite its size, uses Workday for the business. Human Capital Management refers to the functions included in Human Resources management like developing, recruiting, and automating human resources.

As there are different functionalities and operations to work on in multiple departments, the teams rely on Workday software to enhance the organization's performance and development. So, Workday has mostly been used in planning and implementing work strategies for running a business successfully. Depending on the type of organization, the best suitable tool is selected. For instance, if it is a Human Resources related organization, the Workday tool that best suits is Human capital management and Resource planning.

Why Workday?

In the year 2014, a customized reporting tool of Workday was released. It provided various multidimensional analyses such as operational, financial, and reporting analyses specifically designed for large enterprises. The same year, Workday recruiting was released by the vendor. Later, the applications launched in 2016 allowed workday users to apply machine learning and predictive analysis to financial data and workday HCM. This workday planning, budgeting, and forecasting help in unifying the HR Financial planning and analytics according to the vendor. In the same year, i.e.,2016 the IBM cloud was adopted for software testing and development. Workday works on a single cloud-based database for both HCM and financials to provide a better ERP System. The other components of HCM such as finance and talent management are also added to its suite. Later on, various versions were released for specialized markets such as higher education and for government institutions as well.

The Architecture of the Workday

At the start, Workday had just four services: User Interface (UI), Integration, OMS, and Persistence. Although today's Workday architecture is much more complex, the original diagram is still in use to provide a high-level overview of its services.

Workday extends its services by supporting larger customers and easily adding new features. The original services later evolved into multiple discrete services, focusing on a specific task. The high-level architecture diagram gains detail as it transforms into a diagram that resembles a city map, which is connected by a variety of pathways rather than a traditional software architecture diagram. There are districts with distinct characteristics. The roots of each district can be traced back to the services in our original high-level architecture diagram.

Some of the services offered by Workday are described briefly below:

• Object Management Services (OMS): Object Management Services is an array of services that serve as an in-memory database. Hosting business logic is also facilitated for all Workday applications. OMS also provides a runtime environment for XpressO, an application programming language used in implementing Workday business logic. 
• Persistence Services: These Services offer a SQL database for business objects and a NoSQL database for documents. The OSM loads all the business objects into the SQL database at the start and, once functioning, does not rely on it anymore. OMS uses only a few tables, and SQL is treated as a key-value store. The SQL database plays a major role in backup and restoring data.
• UI Services Support: Workday comes with an advanced User Interface (UI) supporting many mobile and browser-based clients. Workday UI is carried out using JavaScript widgets and HTML.
• Integration Services: The multiple applications used by an organization can be easily integrated using Workday. The organization can share the data with many other systems and users through this integration process. With the help of Workday, users can design and build customized integrations in an isolated, secure, and supervised environment offering multiple pre-built connectors and data transformations for custom integrations.
• Deployment tools: Workday offers a wide range of to simplify the customer's process by migrating their legacy systems with easy deployment features. It consists of various deployment tools useful in adopting new and updated Workday products.
• Analytics: Using enterprise analytics and reporting, one can get a centralized source to understand the insights of the data. Workday analytics helps businesses identify risks, discover trends, find new opportunities, and align with market trends.

Workday Opportunities

Workday helps administrators provide and handle benefit programs, from plan designing to enrollment to maintaining key regulations. With an easy and intuitive interface, employees understand the full value of their benefits program.

• Easy-to-Use Employee Enrollment Experience: Workday provides up-to-date employee enrollment workflow with detailed instructions by assisting them with familiar consumer websites through the selection and decision process. Providing a seamless experience from a desktop to mobile,  Workday allows employees to complete enrollment, make changes, and review their choices much more efficiently on any device.
•  Administration Made Simple: Workday offers benefits to the companies by minimizing administrative and maintenance costs by providing a single addressing system for the benefit of Administration. Only a single system handles benefits plans, packages, eligibility guidelines and maintains a record system for employee transactional data and benefits functions. With Workday, administrators can easily configure a full and flexible spectrum of benefits alternatives, including health, retirement, pension, insurance, flex options, wellness credits, allowance plans, as well as leave plans.

Benefits of Workday

• Information can be accessed 24*7 over a secure network.
• With easy-to-use access, personal information updates and be done very easily and comfortably.
• Administrators and Managers can get current information about their teams with the help of current job descriptions.
• New HR and payroll features are introduced and upgraded continuously at least twice a year.
• Automates and simplifies Academic Personnel's correct ranking and tracking in the system.
• Workday allows the reports in real-time to be accessed by mobile devices also.

Conclusion:

Being a well-established platform developed with a vision for the modern workforce and their technology, Workday fits in with the latest IT needs and trends. The ERP can be replaced with Workday for HR and finance management. Because of its continuous updates, it became the most preferred choice among different companies. Workday provides highly innovative ideas and the latest technologies to manage the data. Workday will significantly improve Human Resources and Payroll conformity, reduce risk, provide better decision-making data, and boost efficiencies across the institution. It will also enable people throughout the University to work more efficiently by having consistent, streamlined, and modern practices.