Simplifying Enterprise Integration with the Workday Integration Cloud

The Burden of Enterprise System Integration

The integration of enterprise systems is an expensive and complex issue for most IT organizations. Regardless of the applications—on-premise, cloud-based, or a combination of both—systems integrations typically eat away a good percentage of most IT budgets. Instead of innovating and adding direct value to the business, IT staffs are spending more and more time on their integration infrastructure (e.g., middleware upgrades, security patches, database updates, and router replacements).Do not assume you have to shoulder the heavy burden of enterprise systems integrations alone. Different systems, disparate technologies, continuously growing costs, never-ending maintenance, and immeasurable support headaches—with issues such as these, isn’t it time to demand more from your solutions provider? Modern enterprise vendors like Workday are ready to help.

The Problem with Traditional ERP

Traditional ERP applications were built primarily on a client-server model that did not take into consideration the need for information, data-processing, and communication compatibilities with other systems. To remedy this disconnect, application programming interfaces (APIs) were added later to accommodate system-to-system integration. This low-level approach increased the options available for integrations, but unfortunately also greatly increased the cost and complexity of building and supporting them. In addition, much of the integration to traditional ERP was completed at a data level using SQL. Typically, achieving a more comprehensive integration from the ERP system to necessary bolt-on systems required significant programming, which only added to the cost, complexity, and rigidity of these integrations.

The Workday Approach: Integration in the Cloud 

Human capital, payroll, and financial management systems necessarily need to interact in a variety of ways with other internal and external systems and data sources. Unlike traditional enterprise application providers, Workday understands the importance of integration to core systems of record and started with integration as fundamental architectural and application design criteria. Workday’s approach is for connectivity to other applications and resources to be simpler to build, deploy, manage, and evolve over time—a significant and long- awaited change from the cost, complexity, and rigidity of connecting to traditional enterprise systems. By offering a variety of packaged solutions and integration tools as well as the ability to deploy integrations to the Workday Cloud, Workday helps to relieve customers of the historical burden of systems integration.

 To simplify systems integration, Workday provides the following solutions and tools:

1. Open, Standards-Based Web Services APIs. At the foundation of our approach, Workday provides comprehensive standards-based web services APIs to support all integrations to and from Workday.

2. Integration Cloud Platform. The Workday Integration Cloud Platform is a proven, enterprise- class integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that enables Workday, customers, and partners to build integrations to and from Workday and deploy and manage them in the Workday Cloud.

3. Integration Cloud Connect. Workday offers a growing ecosystem of packaged integrations and connectors to customers. These offerings are 100% built, supported, and maintained by Workday as well as run and managed in the Workday Cloud. This vendor-supported approach significantly shifts the cost, risk, and burden of integrations from the customer to Workday.

Why Use Workday for Integration?

Clearly, you can build any integration you want against the Workday API using your own middleware technology of choice, for example Microsoft.NET, TIBCO, or Oracle Fusion Middleware. 

Many Workday customers do just that. However, there are several major advantages to using the Workday Integration Cloud:

•Integrations surface naturally inside the Workday user interface. You can view the integrations, launch them, schedule them, secure them, include them in Workday business processes, configure notifications around them, and audit and log them—all from within the application.

•Both packaged and custom integrations run on Workday’s software and hardware infrastructure in our data centers. You do not need to license or use any on-premise integration middleware, which can greatly simplify the deployment and management of integrations.

•Finally, although completely based on open standards, Workday’s integration tools are also  highly optimized for efficiently building

•Integrations to and from Workday. Purpose-built packaged components that handle much of the plumbing aspects of integration-building free you to focus on the critical business logic.

Overall, Workday’s packaged integrations and tools are widely proven in a variety of demanding situations and offer a lower-cost, lower-risk path to deliver needed integrations in support of your deployment. 

Workday Embraces Open, Standards-Based Web Services APIs :

At the core of Workday are open, standards-based APIs that give complete programmatic access to business operations and processes. 

These web services-based APIs provide an integration format (SOAP/WSDL or REST) that is interoperable with all the leading client-side languages and integration middleware platforms. In addition, the Workday APIs are fully versioned, which means customers that build an integration against any particular release of Workday are guaranteed those integrations will continue to work across future Workday updates. 

The Workday APIs contains the following categories of service:

• Business Management Services are the primary way to programmatically interact with Workday and directly correspond with the major functional areas of Workday (e.g., Staffing, Benefits, or Financial Management). The operations within these services correspond with business events and business objects within Workday (such as “Hire Employee” within Staffing or “Get Journal” within Financial Management). Operations return extensive data sets but can also be configured via “Response Groups” 

to return a subset of possible data (e.g., contact information, position information, etc.)

• Reporting Services, also known as Reports-as-a- Service (RaaS), provide a flexible, user-defined means to get data out of Workday. All of the reports created using Workday’s built-in report writer can be set up to deliver data via RSS, REST XML, or traditional SOAP-based messages with the simple click of a checkbox. This includes customer-defined calculated fields.

• Reporting Services effectively provide a mechanism within Workday for customers to define and create their own custom APIs. If only a subset of fields within Workday Human Capital Management services are needed for a specific integration, then a custom API that contains only those needed fields can be built. This API can then be consumed by Workday or any third-party integration tool.

• Outbound Messaging Services are used to provide real- time notifications to external applications when business events occur within Workday. For example, the workflow behind the “Hire” event in Workday could be configured to publish an outbound message to a subscribing third- party system. Upon receipt of the real-time notification, the subscribing system could then query Workday (using the public API) to get details about the “Hire” (e.g., employee information, job related information, etc.) and then take appropriate action.

• Infrastructure Services expose Workday metadata to external applications so integrations can be enriched with additional functionality. For example, external applications can monitor the execution of integration events that are happening within Workday. With this metadata, external applications can see not only the status of their current integrations but also gain insight into when and how data will come from Workday prior to the events occurring. This type of transparency gives business users greater visibility into inter-system processing than ever before. 

Workday Integration Cloud Platform Workday’s 

Integration Cloud 

Platform is a proven, enterprise-class Integration 

Platform-as a-Service (iPaaS) for building, deploying, 

and managing integrations to and from Workday. All 

integrations are deployed to and run in the Workday 

Cloud without the need for any on-premise middleware. 

Workday also provides management and monitoring 

services embedded in the Workday user interface. 

 

Powering all of Workday’s integration capabilities is a 

best-of-breed Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture 

that enables Workday’s integrations to scale, interconnect, 

and support the latest industry standards, protocols, 

and formats. Workday’s ESB is a core component of the 

Workday Integration Cloud and provides universal and 

open standards- based connectivity for virtually all types 

of business applications, information, and processes.

                        Powerful Integration Tools Simplify Custom

Integrations for Both Business and IT Workday offers 

a set of easy-to-use integration tools designed to 

solve many of the common integration use cases that 

customers face today

Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB) :

The Workday Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB) tool provides an easy-to-use graphical and guided interface to define inbound and outbound integrations without requiring any programming. The EIB tool can be used by both business and IT users to address a variety of integration needs. 

Outbound EIBs 

Outbound EIBs are used to extract information from the Workday system, and either attach it back to the customer’s tenant for future use or reference or send it somewhere for further processing. Over three-quarters of outbound EIBs currently in production send a file to an external destination via ftp. To create an outbound EIB, users need to only take three steps:

1. Get Data 

In the “Get Data” phase, a data source is 

designated. In 95% of cases, this is a custom report 

(RaaS). If you are specifying a Report Data Source, 

you can choose the format in which the report 

results are delivered: normal XML, simplified XML, 

CSV, JSON, GData, or RSS. Don’t worry if these 

sound confusing—they just mean you can get data 

straight out of the system in a variety of formats 

which may minimize or remove the need for 

subsequent transformation. You can also specify a 

Workday Web Service endpoint as the data source 

for an EIB.

2. Transform 

At this point, you can either choose from the set of 

predefined (XSL) transforms, or specify a new one 

that you will define. The out-of-the-box options 

include transforms to CSV and Excel formats. New 

transforms must be uploaded as valid XSLTs.

3. Deliver 

The output resulting from executing the EIB 

can either be attached back to your tenant, or 

alternatively delivered to an external endpoint. 

Supported transports are SFTP, FTPS, HTTPS, email, 

WebDav, and AS/2. You can optionally compress 

or encrypt documents with a PGP key. You can 

also control the created filename, any sequence 

numbers, and document retention policies where 

appropriate. Once an EIB is defined, it can be 

run by any authorized user. When it runs to 

completion, its status (and any associated output 

files) can be viewed by searching for the EIB run 

(and its associated integration event record)

Inbound EIBs

 

For a number of use cases, especially bulk ones, it 

is convenient to upload information directly to the 

Workday system. In this case, an inbound file is provided 

and associated with a custom transformation. This 

transformation will convert the data into a format 

suitable for sending to a particular Workday Web Service. 

It is a mirror-image of the outbound EIB use case.

In order to simplify this process, Workday generates a 

default spreadsheet for the most common set of bulk 

update operations. These operations include mass payroll, 

time off, benefit adjustments, etc. All you need to do is 

take this generated spreadsheet, add data to it, and then 

use EIB to import it to the system and update all the 

records. The system will proactively notify you of any 

errors in the load process, and will even highlight which 

cells in the input spreadsheet caused the problem. These 

delivered spreadsheets can also be customized so you can 

specifically identify the columns you need, add comments 

to help guide other users who will be inputting the data, 

hide irrelevant fields, etc.