Workday improves UX, introduces finance enhancements

Workday, which provides enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, has announced new technology and user experience (UX) innovations aimed at helping its customer community – which represents more than 60 million workers – to quickly adapt to changing business and employee needs.

To meet customers in the moment and help them manage evolving user expectations, Workday is tailoring its UX to be more intentional for every user type – from employees (desk and deskless) to managers and professional users. By delivering simpler, more intuitive experiences driven by hyper-personalisation and automation, and surfacing those experiences for how and where users prefer to work, Workday aims to empower people so they can take action easily.

The innovations include low-code/no-code development functionality in Workday Extend to help simplify application development. Workday Extend enables organisations to create new capabilities without requiring IT resources or costly new technologies. Customers will be able to leverage the following new capabilities:

· App Builder, a web-based integrated developer environment (IDE), now offers a more intuitive and cohesive build experience with visual and preview modes for business developers. A low-code/no-code visual capability, to be added to App Builder, will enable developers to create apps via a drag-and-drop user interface.

· Workday Graph API, a new tool for developers, will be made available to Workday Extend customers. Based on open-source API query and manipulation language GraphQL, this tool will help streamline the entire API experience to navigate and discover Workday APIs, reducing complexity and ongoing maintenance while improving responsiveness and developer productivity.

"Our continuous innovation on the Workday platform – combined with our commitment to being an open, connected system – is solely for the benefit of our customers and their users to help ensure they have a technology platform that allows them to respond and pivot when the business requires it," said Jim Stratton, CTO, Workday.

"We will continue to deliver the next-generation capabilities that help organisations solve their unique challenges, while advancing the digital experience for all users."

"We're focusing on two key elements as we continue to execute on our vision for the Workday user experience – simplifying the digital experience while elevating the human aspect of that experience," added Jeff Gelfuso, Chief Design Officer, Workday.

"And when it comes to simplifying, we're designing Workday interactions to feel effortless. That means we're meeting every type of Workday user in the natural flow of their work, creating personalised experiences that work for them." Details The low-code/no-code capability for App Builder and Workday Graph API are planned to be available to Workday Extend customers in 1H23.

Workday recently introduced innovations to help support and elevate the office of finance as well. New machine learning (ML) capabilities will increase performance and scalability in planning, plus provide deeper insights into the supply chain. These new innovations deliver on Workday's vision for the office of the CFO to help streamline complex financial processes and surface richer insights with Workday Financial Management, Workday Adaptive Planning, and Workday Spend Management, as well as new Industry Accelerators.

With Workday's new automation and ML capabilities, customers will be able to create a connected and frictionless finance experience that helps reduce inaccuracies and increase employee productivity:

- ML Forecaster in Workday Adaptive Planning, which automatically generates a forecast by allowing users to incorporate historical or third-party data such as weather data or labour statistics.

- Contract search automation in Workday Strategic Sourcing, which automatically extracts key metadata and clauses from third-party paper and legacy contracts to more quickly and accurately identify and search key contract terms, uncover risks, and manage contract obligations.

- Expense Protect in Workday Expenses, which automatically detects potential duplicate expenses, helping eliminate the need for manual review.

- Achieve business agility through company-wide planning at scale. To meet the demand for greater planning frequency, complexity, and data volumes, Workday has delivered increased performance and scalability in Workday Adaptive Planning, gaining more than 60% speed improvement for certain sheet data imports and exports.

- Help drive company-wide environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals with deeper supplier insights. Reporting on ESG initiatives is becoming more critical, which requires transparency into suppliers' data. With new Supplier Diversity discovery boards in Workday Strategic Sourcing, customers have accurate, timely data about supplier diversity ratios to help them understand, track, and make informed decisions about supplier choice. Additionally, Workday Supplier Sustainability helps customers better understand their suppliers' science-based targets, actual and derived CO₂ emissions, and their ESG ratings from third-party analysts.

- Speed cloud transformation with Industry Accelerators. Industry Accelerators help organisations seamlessly transition finance, HR, planning, and supply chain operations to Workday. Working with global partners, Industry Accelerators combine industry practices, proven purpose-built solutions, and ecosystem connectors with Workday to speed time-to-value for banking, healthcare, insurance, and technology companies.

Details

Supplier Diversity discovery boards are available in Workday Strategic Sourcing, and Workday Supplier Sustainability is planned to be available this year. ML Forecaster, Contract Search Automation, and Expense Protect in Workday Expenses are anticipated to be available in the next 12 months.

"The evolution of finance – with teams improving decision making and delivering real-time visibility into critical financial metrics – requires improved data management, analytics, and dynamic planning," said Tom Seal, Senior Research Director, European enterprise applications, IDC.

"By automating core processes and providing a single platform for critical financial and operational data, Workday is helping teams move faster and manage through the complexity and speed of today's business."

"While it's a complex environment for finance professionals, it's also an opportunity for them to partner more closely with the business to mitigate risk and surface valuable insights for their organisation," said Terrance Wampler, Group GM of the office of the CFO, Workday.

"At Workday, our innovations are aimed at helping advance the finance function by streamlining business processes in the cloud and accelerating data analysis so teams can respond faster and take action."

Workday's broader experience strategy consists of three primary pillars – Workday Engage, Workday Everywhere, and Workday Empower. Workday Engage is an initiative focused on making work effortless through frictionless experiences. Workday Today, the reimagined home page now live in production for the entire Workday user base, delivers a personalised experience across devices. In the future, Workday plans to provide a dynamic home layout with drag-and-drop functionality, enabling users to design and configure their homepage.

Workday Everywhere is an initiative focused on bringing Workday to where people prefer to work. Employees can now view required Workday Learning courses from workspaces such as Microsoft Teams or Slack. Managers, on the other hand, can quickly approve team learning enrollments within the flow of work. In the future, Workday plans to provide managers with more detailed team insights, further helping them to focus on employee satisfaction and success.

Workday Empower is an initiative focused on driving hyper-personalisation through machine learning (ML). With the Manager Insights Hub, a people manager can see comprehensive team information, including worker skills, along with actionable, ML-driven insights to help engage and develop employees. In the future, Workday plans to deliver ML that will make recommendations based on past actions – for example, pre-emptively offering to download a report for viewing based on when that specific report is typically accessed.