Business processes (BPs) have been the “heart” of Workday because they enable users to identify whatever workflow steps are needed to complete a task. If yours isn’t running properly, the whole system will shut down. Workday ships with about 300 different BPs that don’t have any embedded rules to tell them how to work (allowing you to configure them to suit your organization), but few businesses will need to use all of them, as some are dedicated to Finance, Higher Education, and so on.

Framework for Workday Business Processes

The Business Process Framework (BPF) is a series of tools that are both efficient and simple to use. It was created with customers in mind. It enables customers to configure and manage core process flows. Thus, it links individuals, applications, and services across Workday product lines.All transaction-related adjustments to data, also known as “events,” occur in the BPF, which is at the heart of Workday applications.

The BPF is more than just a method for configuring process definitions. It includes a powerful runtime engine that analyses process concepts, functions, measures, and condition rules to decide event routing logic.

Workday’s functionality is described by business processes. Workday business process concepts enable you to configure process flows that would otherwise require coding in other vendors. Furthermore, you can make these improvements without using IT or consulting services, avoiding the delays and costs associated with process changes. Conditional logic that can be configured makes it simple to scale processes globally and allows for the development of different flows to support local requirements.

BPF: This Isn’t a Bolt-On

The BPF is unique in that it was deliberately integrated into Workday’s core technology base from the start, while other vendors have built workflow solutions as an afterthought to add on to existing applications and data stores. Because of this one-of-a-kind design decision, the BPF integrates with other Workday native systems like security and organizational hierarchy to ensure that incidents are routed to the appropriate users and evaluated in real-time.

Designed to Aid Business Agility

Change is constant in industry, from mergers and acquisitions to new technological advances and government regulation enforcement. Since most process-related changes can be done by business users without additional IT support, Workday allows you to adapt to and accept change.

As a result, you can easily modify the organizational structure or iterate on various iterations of a process flow until it achieves its maximum potential. The BPF assists you in achieving operational efficiency while minimizing disruption to your enterprise.

Monitoring and visibility of processes

Workday has several configuration options that allow different levels of visibility depending on the type of operation, your position, business feature, hierarchy level, and other factors. You can give your end-users access to process history or keep the information in your administrators’ hands.

Workday also includes pre-built dashboards to help you visually track, optimize, and act on all business processes to ensure they are in line with your goals. This method of visualizing business process data helps you to continuously enhance and increase performance.

Approvals That Aren’t Automated—and Then Some

Your company can use the Workday Business Process Framework to expand process flows to include inbound and outbound integrations, surveys, internal and external resources, document reviews, and more. The BPF helps you to omit unnecessary measures, automate manual processes, and track your vital processes from beginning to end by customizing a configuration to your business’s specific needs.

It’s all in the bag when it comes to auditing.

Workday’s “always-on” auditing capabilities ensure that 100% of all business process changes and executions are tracked from beginning to end. You won’t need to manually store business processes to help potential audit requests if you have that level of information. Both adjustments are visible to auditors, including who made them and the before and after principles. Workday’s degree of openness is unique, and it’s not included in all vendor workflow solutions.

We don’t have enough room to go over all of them here, but we do have enough room to go over a few Workday business process examples.

Typical Business Processes

Change Legal Name is a typical example of a business procedure you’ll come across at some stage. Many businesses have employees initiate this transaction themselves because they know their own name best, but they must have an HR representative observe the legal change by witnessing a legal document given by the employee (such as social security card, court order, passport, etc.).

When you create a business process in Workday (in this case, the Change Legal Name BP), you can specify which business roles can initiate the process, which roles can function within the process, if any (or multiple) approvals are required, and who will be responsible for the process.

For example, you could decide that Mary in HR should be in charge of the Change Legal Name BP’s final approval/verification step, and that an electronic copy of the required documentationis attached. You could also set up the BP to alert anyone in IT if an employee’s name changes, allowing the IT person to update the employee’s user name and active directory account.

A Difficult Business Process

Onboarding is an example of a more dynamic business method. When designing an Onboarding BP, you’ll need to determine exactly what a new employee’s experience should be like (keeping in mind that employees and contract workers will take different paths through the system), and you’ll need to do so in great detail. When designing and configuring your Onboarding BP, there are a few things to keep in mind:

  • Updated legal and preferred names
  • Updated home address and contact details
  • Updated demographic and personal information.
  • Job authorization and identity verification on Form I-9
  • Make tax elections at the federal, state, and local levels (if applicable).
  • Make your banking payment choices.

A greeting message is another thing to think about when making an Onboarding BP. Workday helps you to develop personalized greetings for all workers as well as those segmented by feature. For example, the CEO may send a welcome message to all new employees, while those who report to the CFO may receive an additional message from the CFO. Similarly, you can create a “You Should Meet These People” list that is differentiated by anything as broad as a job role or as specific as an individual hiring manager, depending on the requirements.

Thorough Testing is Needed for BP Creation (AKA Simple Dos and Don’ts for BP Creation)

It’s important to note that all BPs, including the most basic ones, need extensive testing. Any time you add a validation, a conditional flow, or a notification email to a BP, you’re creating a new scenario that needs to be checked to ensure that what shouldn’t trigger a problem does.

  • When deciding whether or not to use a BP workflow, remember this simple rule of thumb:
  • When you need to apply conditional or approval steps to a job, use the Business Process workflow.
  • When creating a simple task for a single user, avoid using the Business Process workflow.

Even though a Change Legal Name transaction is relatively easy for an employee to complete on their own, the need for an approval/verification stage (as well as the utility of a conditional step) makes the BP workflow worthwhile.

Conclusion

Bringing in the experts is another way to set up the business processes in Workday. Our senior Workday consultants have years of experience working with clients to not only set up but also thoroughly test any scenario you’ll need. You can learn more about these business processes through Workday online training.