Workday Implementation Challenges – All You Need To Know

Workday is a globally recognized human capital management (HCM) and financial management solution that ensures full audit compliance and smooth user experience. However, when it comes to Workday implementation, it’s devilish in detail. In this article, we’ll discuss the most popular Workday implementation challenges and how to overcome them.

Top Workday Implementation Challenges

Unclear Project Scope: Often, ERP implementation projects are plagued with timelines and budget overruns. The main reason for this is companies don’t have clarity around the main objective of the project. Organizations won’t be able to create a clear roadmap for the project.

Absence of Proper Documentation: Implementing Workday can be a challenging process without proper documentation. At times, enterprises fail to create proper documentation featuring ‘Standard Operating Procedure‘ that specifies how Workday can be used and for what use case. ERP implementation is all about identifying the bottlenecks and optimizing the processes to improve efficiency. However, if manual process documentation is involved, there are chances that inconsistencies will occur.

Existing HR Practices & Processes: Different enterprises follow a different set of processes / practices. There is a possibility that default Workday configuration might not address your organizational current needs. In such a situation, you need to heavily customize your software. Another case may be when you need to integrate your Workday instance with third-party applications. In both cases, you need to provide an adequate budget and timeline to make your project a grand success.

Testing Phase: The success of an ERP implementation project lies with the business users since they’re the people who understand the specific business functions, like HR, Finance, or Payroll. If manual testing is incorporated, multiple test cycles need to be incorporated which can be time consuming, labor-intensive and can become frustrating for business users.

Manual testing isn’t viable as it could delay your implementation. Here’s why:

• If you follow a rigid Waterfall approach, defects will be detected at the end of the development phase. It’ll take longer to fix these defects as you need to change the entire system.
• If bugs are found very late, then it will lead to too much rework, redesign and rethinking of strategy. It will impact the time to market adversely.

QA teams should use “Continuous Testing”. It’s about testing early, often, and comprehensively so that bugs can be identified and fixed early. However, to introduce continuous testing, enterprises need to incorporate test automation.

Test automation speeds up the process and also ensures adequate risk coverage. However, script based test automation will not solve your purpose as business users i.e. people within the specific business functions, like HR, Finance, or Payroll find it tough to create test cases with code based test automation platform.

You need a zero code test automation platform that allows business users to create test cases without requiring programming skills.

Major Updates: Workday aims to transform your business. To support this, Workday offers two major updates in the year. These updates need to be tested to ensure that all your critical workflows are fine. A typical Workday implementation for a large enterprise requires 4-6 months. With Workday rolling out major updates bi-annually, there is a high probability that you might have to accommodate 1-2 of major upgrades during or just after the launch.

So, enterprises looking for Workday implementation should prepare for update testing. They need to bring in a test automation framework that not only speeds up testing but also alleviates test script maintenance burden.

Opkey – Ensuring Workday Implementation Doesn’t Have to Be a Nightmare

Opkey is a zero code Workday test automation platform that allows business users to create test scripts without requiring programming knowledge. Apart from this, opkey’s patent pending test mining technology autonomously mines your existing processes to provide you the virtual twin of your existing processes. Autonomous process discovery provides you with a clear scope of project along with recommendations for testing so that critical tests can be executed first to mitigate business risks. Opkey’s prebuilt test templates also help you during major releases by offering you exact scope of testing. This will cut unnecessary efforts while keeping business risks at bay.