Q4 2020: The power of Workday Extend

“When will Workday open up it’s platform?” was a question commonly heard across the Workday Community. Interaction with Workday historically has either been within their UI, or via integration and reporting in order to get data in and out of the system. With Workday Extend, we now have the power to build our own screens, objects and APIs within the same technology stack that Workday’s developers use for the core product.

Workday Extend (formerly known as Workday Cloud Platform) enables customers and partners to utilize Workday technology to build applications and extend the delivered capabilities of Workday to meet their unique business needs. Generally available since May 2020, the tool provides a highly configurable solution for business analysts to extend Workday using the Workday designer tool. By using the ‘Power of One’ technology it enables organizations to provide employees with the same familiar end user experience whilst leveraging the same single source of data and security model.

Using the Workday technology will bring several benefits to your business processes, your organization and most importantly your people. We’ve highlighted some key benefits below:

•  Building apps custom to your business using the Extend technology enables you to leverage the robust Workday security framework to ensure your data remains secure.

• Whilst customers can submit brainstorms to request an additional feature or functionality, why wait? You can solve your business needs now rather than making do with the solutions available today.

• Building apps for your employees using the Workday technology ensures a seamless and consistent end user experience, in turn enhancing your end user adoption.

• Most of us are familiar with the AppStore or the Google Play Store, why not open up new possibilities for your organization by building your own apps to meet your unique needs.

• Workday Extend enables you to unlock new value for your organization, increasing organizational agility.

Are you considering enhancing your existing technology infrastructure using Workday Extend? We recommend considering the following questions as part of your planning process:

1. Is this problem solvable with Workday Extend?
2. Should this problem be solved with Workday Extend?
3. Does Workday already have this functionality?
4. Is this functionality on Workday’s feature roadmap?
5. Is third-party technology required?
6. Does this solution leverage The Power of One?

Workday Extend is great at solving for your unique business needs as well as functionality that doesn’t yet exist in Workday that you would benefit from using now. Below are some use cases of apps that can be developed using Workday Extend:

• Charitable Giving

• Onboarding

• Year at a Glance

• Vehicle Registration

• Report Requests

• CV/Resume Generator

• Degree Approval

• Tuition Reimbursement

• Flexible Work Arrangement

• Promotion Nomination

• Sales Opportunity Tracker

• Transit Route Search

• Supplier Managed Requisitions

• Project Based Feedback

• Talent Insights

• Peer/Mentor Matching

Many of you will know that we are a Workday customer as well as a Workday partner and we saw an opportunity to solve for a business need using the Workday Extend functionality. One of our core values at Alight is People Matter and we wanted a way to enable our colleagues around the world to donate money to other colleagues whenever a disaster strikes. Using the Workday Extend tools, we built a funding app that allows us to react quickly whenever a disaster strikes and allows our colleagues from around the globe to come together to support other colleagues in need.

The Contracting Contingent Worker functionality delivered in Workday today has a series of questions and parameters that are there to ensure most, if not all, of the typical subject matters are covered. Our customer wanted to streamline this process and make it specific to their internal hiring process to save time and effort when processing contingent workers. We partnered with our customer to deploy a seamlessly integrated app leveraging existing data sources in turn providing a more streamlined contingent worker process.

Workday Extend is available to Workday customers today as an additional SKU. It does require a level of expertise to implement, both functional in page creation and knowledge of web services and Json but as always Workday have provided courses and resource materials to assist customers. We are proud to be a certified Workday Extend Partner having worked closely with Workday on the roadmap and functionality since the start. We have been building apps for our customers since 2018 and as a Workday customer ourselves have been leveraging the functionality to build apps to solve for our own internal business needs We can partner with you from the outset to analyze your business use cases and assess whether Workday Extend is the appropriate solution to the problem you are trying to solve for and will use our unique experience and point of view to guide you through the build, testing and deployment.