BUSINESS-DRIVEN CONFIGURABILITY

Every enterprise application requires initial setup to support the unique requirements of the organization it supports. An application also needs post-implementation agility to easily adapt to the changing needs of the business. With configuration options being a core aspect of Workday, an organization can change and evolve the system as the needs of the business change and evolve, and benefit from a lower cost of ownership without breaking future updates. What's more, these changes can be driven by the business user, saving valuable IT resources and budget for other strategic projects.

As a result, Workday deploys in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional legacy ERP systems. Workday also continues to maintain its relevancy to the business post-implementation by quickly and easily adapting to the changing requirements of the business.

This business model offers many advantages to the customer:

Rapidly deploy Workday using pre-built best practice templates

To help with fast, predictable, and lower cost cloud application implementations, Workday has over 200 pre-configured best practice business processes for ease of configuration and reconfiguration. For example, you may configure or reconfigure rules and conditions, designated approvers, revision steps, to-do lists and checklists, notifications, custom help text, and more.

Eliminate costly and disruptive customization projects

Traditional legacy ERP systems are generally considered to be neither flexible nor agile because of their lack of configuration options. As a workaround, hard-coded customizations were added by in-house specialist IT personnel or third-party consultants. This was not only time-consuming and expensive for IT, it was highly disruptive to the business. It also had the downstream effect of breaking future software upgrades requiring highly expensive and time-consuming re-implementations of the software.

The end result was enormously complex applications with an extremely high lifetime cost of ownership that ultimately impeded business change as opposed to enabling it. Workday has corrected that flawed delivery and ownership model by designing our enterprise applications with configuration as a core design principle for both initial setup and post go-live reconfiguration.

Always on the latest release

Keeping the system customization free allows you to leverage the latest and best business practices and technology—from mobile to embedded analytics—giving your company the ability to maintain its competitive advantage without the traditional cost of upgrading to a new version.

Reconfigure post go-live to stay current with changing business needs

Workday was specifically designed with post-implementation agility in mind—performing re-organizations, reconfiguring business processes, and creating ad-hoc reports can all be accomplished without IT assistance. This ability to stay current and relevant to the business as it grows and evolves with new divisions, markets, geographies, and regulatory requirements is one of Workday's key benefits.

Community collaboration

In today's world of instant collaboration, software-as-a-service (SaaS) enables you to seek advice and guidance from subject-matter experts within your industry peer group. As everyone is on the same version of the software with no code-level customizations, Workday customers are able to share their experiences online on everything from deploying new functionality to popular report templates to change-management best practices.