Workday Envy

This week I had he chance to attend a webinar from Workday centered on the annual Benefits Enrollment process.  It was an excellent session, that showcased Workday's cool user interface, intuitive design, and powerful features. Let's just say I left the webinar with an extreme case of 'system envy'.

For the last few years myself and a colleague in HR have been responsible for ensuring the smooth running of our organization's annual Open Enrollment, which has been done entirely online for four or five years.  In fact, online or web-enabled benefits enrollment is not that novel a concept any more.  If you went to an organization that was still passing out paper enrollment forms, you would probably be surprised.

But Workday takes the process a major step further, with their concept of the 'Workday Benefits Network'.  Essentially, Workday will (for a fee) take over the responsibility of creating the interfaces from your HR system, to the benefits providers for the purposes of enrolling employees in plans and recording changes. I can't begin to describe how much time, effort and cost we have endured in developing and maintaining (on our own) the necessary file feeds from our HR system to our various providers.  It is an annual exercise it seems, us tweaking and modifying our custom code to meet the providers new or changed formats, waiting to hear back from their tech staffs, and us making still more modifications.

Frankly, it is a low-value, behind the scenes activity that is important, but invisible to our employees and managers.

I would love for our ERP provider to take ownership of all of those processes, but I doubt that would ever happen.

Can we switch to Workday now?  

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Comments

[Cindy Andrews]

Steve -

If I understand your description of Workday services, correctly, I think ADP has the ability to offer these services. We just started using ADP's PayeExpert for processing payroll which interfaces with ADP's HRB (HRIS) product. This will allow us to offer self service to our employees. Which then allows us to offer Open Enrollment on line. In doing this, ADP will feed the information to the benefit providers.

I have not experienced this real time as of yet as our Open Enrollment is not until November but we have just gone live with both ADP products and are in the process of getting ready to role out self-serve to our employees.

I'll keep you posted!

Cindy

[Steve]

Hi Cindy,

Thanks for the information and comment. I am interested to learn more about the ADP functionality in this area. Most of my experience is from an Oracle applications perspective, and I know we go through an annual process of revising and testing the interfaces to our Benefits providers. Oracle does support the 'standard' file format fairlywell out of the box, but as you know each provider usually requires some custom 'wrapper' or other modifications to be made to the interface. It just adds to the overall cost of providing these Benefits to the employees.

Thanks,
Steve

[Dave Anderson]

Hi Steve,
I know this is an older post but I searched it to see if you had anything to say about Workday's HRMS. I looked at it last year but didn't get the budget approval for it. I think I might have the budget this year but it was a year ago that I last looked at it. Have you heard anything about them since--new developments, good/bad?

Thanks,

Dave Anderson
Global Human Resources Manager
Double-Take Software

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