HR Integration Framework

Workday is the modern solution that has been consistently designed in regards to user experience for employees and managers. Workday is particularly suitable as a global HCM system that can be quickly implemented for the entire workforce. Payroll and time management, on the other hand, are often still better located in an (existing) SAP HCM, as Workday does not offer payroll functionality for all countries yet. Also, to reduce complexity of the initial Workday implementation by out-scoping of local requirements. The same applies to existing interfaces, especially to local systems. These should initially continue to be connected to the SAP HCM system and then, if necessary, step-by step be migrated to Workday.

Workday offers the possibility to deliver data online to external systems via so-called WebServices. Since this type of communication is also supported by the SAP system (and is used, for example, in the SuccessFactors integration), we combine this in our framework to create a unique integration solution. For security reasons, the communication is always initiated by the SAP system. The advantage of this approach is that you can make several WebService calls in one synchronisation run, so that the systems really interact smoothly.

Yes, besides the WebServices to export data, Workday also offers functionalities to import all data via WebService. We therefore use the same technical basis, except that this time the Workday request contains HR data (instead of selection criteria) and we only get the generated Workday IDs or an error message back to SAP. Our framework contains additional functionalities, e.g. to automatically trigger a replication to Workday in case of infotype changes.

The data migration works according to the same principle as the SAP to Workday integration, except that considerably more data must be replicated to Workday here – without there being any data change. For this purpose, we have developed special programmes that read existing data from SAP and trigger a replication to Workday for each data record. For example, in addition to someone’s hire, a future termination that has already been entered can also be transferred to Workday.