Lucia Cavero-Baptista
Workday is among the fastest growing and most robust ERP systems that includes built-in automation functionalities.
Its Financial Management platform is among the best and most comprehensive accounting solutions for large companies, offering automated banking functions such as reconciliation, money transfers sent directly from within the system, the ability to record and settle large numbers of entries in bulk, and a plethora of other web services that allow automation.
Why automate Workday
Workday also offers built-in integrations with other relevant solutions, and it even has its own Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB) and integration functionalities that allow it to pull data from external sources in bulk, but those functions are limited in the type of data they can interact with as well as the types of changes that are possible.
Meaning, there are still many interactions that Workday cannot automate. For example, you can cancel payments in Workday using an EIB, but you cannot use an EIB to cancel a payment that has already been reconciled in the tenant.
If numerous payments are loaded with discrepancies in the data and those payments are (automatically) reconciled by an automation process within Workday, there is no way to bulk edit the payments within the features that Workday offers.
The result is; a lot of data has to be handled manually, which in turn increases the chances of data entry errors within Workday.
These errors could be as simple as choosing the wrong drop-down box or typing data into the wrong fields. At first, they might seem like small mistakes, but the potential impact on your financial operations could be big.
How to implement Workday automation
For this reason, more and more companies are opting for automation solutions that will increase the efficiency of their Workday tenant. These solutions are based on Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a discipline where you let a software robot perform specific interactions between a human and a computer in order to complete a task.
However, developing RPA functions is costly and time-consuming and it requires personnel with specialized and expensive skills. Therefore, the two main reasons why most businesses choose not to develop RPA in-house are cost and maintenance. It is expensive to hire a team of programmers who often don’t understand the business enough to develop processes that generate enough value to be worth the cost of building them.
Because the developers are the only ones who understand and can maintain the code, the upkeep of these processes continues to generate costs while providing limited value once the solution is implemented.
So how can a company get the most out of automation without incurring massive implementation and maintenance costs? The answer is no-code automation.
No-code automation tools allow the everyday business user to automate any predictable and repeatable interaction with zero programming knowledge. This is done through an intuitive user interface (UI).
RECOMMENDED READING - Testing in Workday: Why, How, and Which Automation Tools?
How to leverage no-code automation in Workday
Leapwork is capable of performing any task in the tenant that a user does manually in the UI. Because of that, a workflow can be developed in Leapwork to "unreconcile" and edit payments in mass, saving dedicated resource hours in data correction and removing the potential for human error while providing a stable re-usable solution that can be used again and again.
Given that Leapwork can recreate any action that the user performs in the user interface, and it can be developed by the users who perform processes regularly, Leapwork has the potential to automate any action that a worker would perform.
Additionally, Leapwork is not limited to the Workday UI and can perform tasks across multiple applications in the same design flow, giving it the potential to replace some complex integrations. With Leapwork, it is possible to replicate an integration’s functionality with a fraction of the development time as long as there is a user interface to work with.
More complex studio integrations can take 100+ hours to build, test, and implement because there is a great deal of manual coding, back and forth with various teams or departments, and an immense amount of testing.
Thanks to Leapwork’s no-code automation, you can develop and test in a fraction of the time that it would take to develop an integration for the same process.
Example of a Workday automation use case with Leapwork
A company records its customer payments in Workday but then needs to login to a bank portal to actually send the money. In order to perform this, they need to develop an integration that:
- Retrieves payment data from Workday
- Formats the information to adhere to the bank's specific requirements
- Sends the file via web service to the bank, which records the payments and sends the money.
This kind of integration could be costly and take months of working with specialized consultants to develop. Alternatively, an advanced report that pulls the necessary payment information can be created in Workday and extracted as an Excel file.
That file can then be used to drive a Leapwork automation flow that logs into the bank portal and records the payments. Developing the Leapwork flow requires no developer(s) and can be built and tested in a fraction of the time by the same person who was responsible for the manual process.
Leapwork empowers companies to automate these tedious and error-prone tasks, in a fraction of the time with less technical resources.
If you want to learn more about how to automate Workday with Leapwork, watch our latest co-hosted webinar with Makse Group, an experienced Workday consultancy firm. Watch now here:
This blog post was written in collaboration with Makse Group.