Waste Connections simplifies bulk compensation with Workday Extend.

Managing compensation adjustments for a large, distributed workforce is notoriously complex and requires total accuracy, especially when changes happen across multiple regional business units simultaneously. Waste Connections, a leading provider of waste management and recycling services in North America, faced exactly this hurdle. 

As the company grew, field managers and controllers frequently needed to submit bulk compensation requests—such as bonuses, incentives, and annual increases—for 50+ employees at once. The existing process required a separate request for each worker, so the company purchased an external, third-party application to stage and submit these grouped entries. However, this standalone tool completely lacked data validation. Field users frequently made typographical errors, forcing the payroll team into a constant loop of emails to correct the records before processing. To eliminate this administrative strain and retire the costly external software, Waste Connections used Workday Extend to build a native solution directly inside their Workday tenant.

Optimizing bulk compensation request workflows.

To resolve this bottleneck, the company built a custom app called Comp Connect with Workday Extend. The app improves data integrity with real-time validation checks and alerts directly on the field manager's entry page. This upfront verification prevents typos and data mismatches from ever entering the workflow, ensuring payroll receives clean data from the start.

Once submitted, bulk requests route to a custom page in the payroll administrator's Workday inbox, allowing them to verify the totals and initiate the entire multi-line payment run with a single click.

Field leaders and the payroll team find the Workday Extend experience easier to navigate and more visually appealing than the legacy third-party application. This native setup eliminates a "payroll Monday" headache: administrators no longer have to spend up to three hours manually building, formatting, and debugging Excel-based Enterprise Interface Builders (EIBs) from scratch just to upload data from the legacy external system.

Rapidly resolving payroll errors with Workday Orchestrate.

The backend of Comp Connect uses Workday Orchestrate and standard Workday APIs to securely route bulk payment transactions. To ensure no payment transaction falls through the cracks, a custom business process event handles errors automatically. If a specific payment row fails for any reason, the orchestration isolates only that failed line and automatically sends it back to the payroll admin's inbox with clear error visibility.

Previously, admins had to manually run separate audit reports and cross-check logs to identify which specific rows failed. Now, they can simply click submit and check their inbox within seconds to verify if any failed lines returned, completely removing the manual detective work from tight payroll windows.

Driving enterprise innovation as a self-taught developer.

The successful deployment of the Comp Connect app—which combines the power of both Extend and Orchestrate—shows what one developer can accomplish with Workday Build. Jules Mayberry is the only Workday developer at Waste Connections, and she stepped into the role as a veteran returning to the workforce with no traditional coding background or software development experience.

By leveraging her cross-functional skillset, the Workday Community, and self-directed training videos and platform documentation, she mastered Extend and Orchestrate independently to build this enterprise-grade solution. Her experience shows how business expertise, learning resources, and low-code tools can open new paths to development. With this foundation in place, Jules is already building a second custom security request Extend app to grant field managers greater autonomy when requesting and managing security roles within their units.

Accelerating business impact with agentic AI.

Looking ahead, Waste Connections is exploring ways to expand its application roadmap with Sana—specifically, Developer Agent. Developer Agent uses natural-language instructions to generate code, answer questions, and recommend best practices for building on Workday.

Jules is particularly excited to build custom agents on top of Extend apps to embed conversational AI functionality for end users to boost productivity. Developer Agent can give her a starting point for development and reduce time spent researching technical requirements. This shifts her role from deep technical configuration to strategic problem-solving, freeing up time to collaborate closely with field stakeholders and design creative, high-impact solutions tailored to frontline operations.