Companies are constantly changing. Reorganizations, entry into new markets, and mergers and acquisitions are part of day-to-day business. But agile companies embrace change for competitive advantage and need systems that can keep up with changing business demands.

Current enterprise systems allow limited configuration by letting you set certain parameters at the time of initial implementation. After you're in production, additional configuration is very limited. Most changes are extensions to the system that involve adding or changing code and adding or changing database tables. These extensions break future upgrades by introducing differences for which the tested conversion cannot account.

Keep pace with changing business needs

Workday believes enterprise systems should be configurable and reconfigurable at any time—based on business needs not technology limitations. That means:

• Reorganizing reporting hierarchies without coding or IT intervention should be simple
• Configuring business processes not only for your company but by organization within your company should be painless
• You should be able to flexibly track spend and revenue by tagging detail entries instead of asking IT for another chart field
• And you should be able to do this without breaking the upgrade.

Workday’s agility allows our system to be changed without altering code or changing database structure. For example, when a team moves into a new organization, Workday disconnects the object representing that team (and thereby all its subordinates) from the first organization and then connects them to the second. Instead of going through multiple systems and searching for every column and row where individual records are kept, we just move the group.

When you tag a payment to assign it to a certain project, Workday creates a new instance of a tag and relates it to existing detail lines. To most systems these changes require redesign. However, since Workday services are 100% defined as meta-data, these changes are more like business transactions than development redesign.

Workday Difference

Agility | Global | Governance | Integration | Measurement | On-Demand | Simplicity