A Guide to

Workday Integration
Contents
Improving HCM processes through Workday integration 3
Integration challenges for modernizing HCM 5
Your Workday integration options 6
How an iPaaS eases the integration burden 7
How iPaaS eases the integration burden, continued 8
The top 5 ways an iPaaS can accelerate Workday value 9
1. Accelerating recruitment 10

2. Simplifying employee onboarding 11

3. Automating the hire-to-retire process 12

4. Providing people analytics 13

5. Managing financials 14

Conclusion 15

A Guide to Workday Integration | 2

Many companies are replacing their legacy data architecture and rebuilding it
for the cloud. HR systems are caught up in this shift. Increasingly, best-of-breed
human capital management (HCM) solutions are replacing monolithic legacy
ones. This is especially true when it comes to Workday.
In many cases, companies deploy Workday alongside other HCM solutions for
talent management, workforce planning, people analytics, and so on. Moreover,
they often link Workday with existing on-premises software such as enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems. At the same time, some organizations opt for
the full Workday HCM suite, but forego the Financial Management modules and
instead use SAP, Oracle, or another established alternative.
All that to say, to drive business transformation with Workday, you must integrate
it with a host of cloud and legacy applications and databases. Unfortunately,
conventional approaches to integration undermine such efforts.

This eBook explains:

† The problem with traditional approaches to Workday integration

† How SnapLogic’s Intelligent Integration Platform solves those problems

† How to automate five common HR and finance processes

A Guide to Workday Integration | 3

Workday integration without SnapLogic
Traditional integration methods cause you to spin your
wheels in the mud of integration maintenance. Such
approaches include but are not limited to ESB (enterprise
service bus) and ETL (extract, transform, load) tools as
well as point-to-point integration with custom hand-
coding, the most common approach.

Get business
requirements

Write code to Plan for and manage Plan for and manage
Learn Unit testing of
interface with for software upgrades, for software upgrades,
Workday API the code
Workday API networking changes etc. networking changes etc.

Read documentation, Read documentation,

Update the code for
forums to resolve forums to resolve
unpredictable break fix or
errors, bugs errors, bugs
every 6 months depending
on endpoints

Without SnapLogic, organizations have to allocate developer resources to learn Workday API, write and
test code, manage software upgrades, and update the code for unpredictable break fixes: a significant
drain on time, money, and people resources.

A Guide to Workday Integration | 4

The Problem with ESB and ETL
y Built for the legacy era, these tools make it difficult to build and
operate integrations

y Require highly trained integration specialists to operate these tools

y ESB/ETL integration is slow, cumbersome, and expensive

The Problem with Manual Coding and Point-to-Point Integration

y Drains exorbitant time, money, and resources

y Requires highly trained integration specialists (increasingly scarce skills)

y Code is susceptible to breaking, creating more integration headaches

The ESB/ETL and hand-code approaches to Workday integration trap IT

developers, data architects, and HR information system (HRIS) professionals
in integration housekeeping, preventing them from realizing value from their
investments in new applications.

A Guide to Workday Integration | 5

SnapLogic: Connect Workday to the enterprise with
clicks, not code
Given the requirement to sync Workday with multiple applications, endpoints,
and data sources, enterprises need a simple, flexible, and scalable way to address
integration challenges. The SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform (IIP) is
the perfect solution.
A cloud-native integration platform as a service (iPaaS), SnapLogic accelerates
data and process flow between Workday and applications, data warehouses,
big data stores, and IoT data streams — whether they are on-premises, in the
cloud, or somewhere in between. Moreover, SnapLogic is intuitive, easy to use,
and requires minimum IT assistance for the user to obtain insights. At the same
time, it’s highly scalable, so integrations maintain performance regardless of
volume or complexity. The platform also employs machine learning algorithms
to automate repetitive, low-level development tasks along with self-learning
capabilities to greatly improve the speed and quality of integrations.

Get business
requirements

Configure the Business user acceptance

Workday Snap and testing after initial
build pipelines deployment and after every
endpoint update

With SnapLogic Workday Snap, organizations can focus on strategic IT initiatives rather than worry about
complex Workday API.

A Guide to Workday Integration | 6

“Snaps”: The key to self-service Workday integration
One of the chief ways SnapLogic enables self-service integration is through
APPLICATION
intelligent pre-built connectors called Snaps. Building Workday integrations is TRACKING SYSTEM

as easy as dragging and dropping Snaps expressly designed for Workday HCM,
Financial Management, and Analytics. Since Snaps abstract the complexity
of Workday, and other application APIs, they vastly reduce the time and effort CAREER
MGMT
BACKGROUND
CHECK

needed to connect two or more endpoints. Additionally, with Snaps IT developers

don’t have to learn and master the Workday API every time it is updated.

Workday Snap Pack Workday Prism Snap Pack PAYROLL BENEFITS

The SnapLogic Workday Snap Pack, This Snap Pack connects to Workday
by abstracting the Workday API in a Prism analytics platform that lets
visual manner, enables you to read organizations bring data in, at scale,
data from and write data to Workday from any source and then prepare,
without writing custom code or analyze, and share it for insightful
dealing with a complex ESB. business decisions. Prism Analytics
can be used on Workday data and
Workday Read Snap: Retrieves
data from third-party solutions.
data from Workday and delivers it
in a simplified output format Workday Prism Bulk Load Snap:
ANALYTICS ERP

so it can be easily consumed by Uploads multiple records/files from

downstream systems. multiple sources such as ERP, CRM,
CRM

databases, and Workday HCM.

Workday Write Snap: Ingests data
from other systems and brings it With pre-built connectors for
directly into the Workday. Workday and 500+ other endpoints,
you can largely automate the
Workday Cancel Snap: Cancels a
following five HR processes.
transaction such as an invoice or
contract deal if the business process
or use case so requires.

A Guide to Workday Integration | 7

 We needed to move and manage large amounts of
data from our existing financial and human resource
systems into Workday. SnapLogic was built for the cloud,
supports hybrid cloud applications and data integration,
and gives us the ability to scale by building and managing
integrations more quickly.
– Deputy CIO at Vassar College

A Guide to Workday Integration | 8

Automate 5 vital Workday processes
By leveraging the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform and Workday
Snap Pack, organizations gain a leg up on tackling integration challenges for
critical HCM and finance use cases. These five examples show how SnapLogic
streamlines Workday integrations.

1. Accelerate recruiting

2. Simplify employee onboarding

3. Automate hire-to-retire

4. Fuel people analytics

5. Streamline financials

A Guide to Workday Integration | 9

Accelerate recruiting
The challenge
Streamlining recruitment requires leveraging data from multiple systems.
You might have an enterprise platform that serves as a clearinghouse for job
requisition requests, while other applications handle scheduling, applicant
screening, candidate debriefing for relevant stakeholders, and so on.
Integrating these systems by hand:
1
y Costs gobs of time, money, and resources

y Prolongs the time-to-value of Workday

y Creates inflexible workflows that are hard to modify

The solution
The SnapLogic Workday Snap Pack streamlines the entire integration process
by automating and creating seamless data flows between myriad systems
without the need for time-consuming and expensive coding. In this way, IT
professionals are freed up from hands-on integration busy work, allowing
them to redirect time and energy to other, high-value initiatives.

A Guide to Workday Integration | 10

Simplify employee onboarding
The challenge
Onboarding new employees is a complex process involving an array of systems,
from payroll to registering for benefits to directory services governing identity
and access. The typical approach is to collect and process new hire information
in a batch processing mode. Moreover, new employees must set up multiple
log-ins for different systems. Without SnapLogic, employee onboarding can:
2
y Be inefficient, expensive, and error-prone

y Create a poor new-hire experience

y Hurt productivity for HR, IT, and new hires

The solution
SnapLogic’s Workday Snap Pack allows IT organizations to easily tap into all
the right systems on a real-time basis, providing an efficient and seamless
experience for employees. The system will automatically preconfigure access
to pre-hire resources and enter new employee information in the Workday
HCM. It can generate new passwords, establish account control settings, and
create an Active Directory or LDAP account once a new user is onboarded. At
the same time, SnapLogic will set up payroll, the employee portal, and access to
benefits and other required systems – all in real-time. This streamlines business
processes and improves the overall employee experience.

A Guide to Workday Integration | 11

Automate hire-to-retire
The challenge
Multiple systems, including Workday, support employees throughout their
entire tenure, from initial hire to talent development all the way to retirement.
Without automation, companies have to manually enter employee information
into each of the various systems. Such an approach:
3
y Eats up considerable time and yields costly errors

y Hurts IT, HR, and employee productivity

y Perpetuates data silos and stifles reporting

The solution
Snaps transform the entire hire-to-retire process, allowing organizations to
build scheduled or triggered pipelines — essentially integrations for specific
applications which are “snapped” together to create a seamless workflow between
systems — using configuration as opposed to manual coding. This approach
rapidly optimizes an organization’s hire-to-retire employee process, delivering
efficiencies and time savings. Consider a common example of an employee
retiring or leaving a firm. With the Workday Snap Pack, the system automatically
removes all of the departing employee’s credentials across systems, reducing
security risks without requiring a significant programming effort on the part of IT.

A Guide to Workday Integration | 12

Fuel people analytics
The challenge
Data is critical to HR’s strategic decisions around talent acquisition and
retention, compensation, learning, workforce planning and development, and
so on. The problem is that the right data never resides in a single system; it’s
distributed across multiple systems of record, from enterprise HR platforms
to obscure applications for specific departments to third-party systems.
4
Conventional approaches to forging integrations for analytics:
y Perpetuate data silos and stifle reporting

y Lead to dirty, unreliable data

y Dramatically prolong the time-to-insight for HR

The solution
SnapLogic’s Workday Snap Pack empowers HR with just the right data set,
enabling them to run analytics and garner insights about employees across
various systems and using preferred analytics tools (Tableau, Looker, Microsoft
Power BI, etc.). Because integration is easy and fast (in real-time), HR
organizations can easily sync up and ingest data from any number of systems to
buttress data-driven analytics efforts and uncover insights simply not possible
with information silos.

A Guide to Workday Integration | 13

Streamline financials
The challenge
Many Workday customers integrate with Workday’s financial modules to
compensate employees, account for expenses and commissions in real-time,
and support critical sales processes like quote-to-cash. Unfortunately, in a
conventional setting:
5
y Financial data is siloed and incompatible

y Workflows are manual, ruling out a single source of truth

y Widespread manual data entry leads to costly errors

The solution
Beyond the ability to sync up Workday HCM with related systems, SnapLogic’s
Workday Snap Pack can also streamline connectivity to Workday’s Financial
Management modules. This enables you to consolidate financial data from any ERP
or data source to speed up close processes, automate quote-to-cash and procure-
to-pay process flows, and sync up data between different systems.

A Guide to Workday Integration | 14

Real-world results
As HR steps into a more strategic enterprise role, legacy platforms are
migrating to the cloud and being modernized with best-of-breed point
solutions. Yet to achieve their goals, HR organizations need to reimagine
integration and shed costly manual efforts in favor of intelligent solutions.
SnapLogic is such a solution. Organizations that adopt SnapLogic launch
strategic initiatives faster, kick business performance into high gear, and keep
employees happy for the long-term.

A Guide to Workday Integration | 15

For more information visit snaplogic.com

About SnapLogic
SnapLogic provides the #1 intelligent integration platform. The company’s AI-powered workflows and self-service integration capabilities make it fast and easy for organizations to manage all their application
integration, data integration, and data engineering projects on a single, scalable platform. Hundreds of Global 2000 customers — including Adobe, AstraZeneca, Box, Emirates, GameStop, and Wendy’s — rely on
SnapLogic to automate business processes, accelerate analytics, and drive digital transformation. Learn more at snaplogic.com.

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