Workday HCM Feature Alert: Save time on Staffing Business Processes

Workday HR Administrators will likely be familiar with the ‘Manage Business Processes for Worker’ Business Process (BP) step, which forms part of a number of Core HCM and Absence Business Processes.

It triggers when Workers that are changing or leaving a position have outstanding steps to complete on a Business process or have Workday Inbox items outstanding, giving the user the option to review or re-route them for action. It's useful as it means that these items do not slip through the net, but it can create a significant amount of time-consuming manual effort, especially for those administering Workday for larger organisations.

So I am pleased to tell you that it has changed for the better, with Workday introducing a new feature called ‘Auto-Manage Business Processes’. This functionality, is available on 4 BPs;

• Change Job
• Terminate Employee
• End Contingent Worker Contract
• Request Leave of Absence

It enables you to configure a new Service step (called Auto-Manage Business Processes), to automatically take action on Business Processes and Inbox items that would previously have been manually processed as part of the existing Manage Business Processes for Worker step.

Automation options

The potential options for the rules are extensive and Workday will allow up to 50 automation rules to be defined for this, but a couple of automation examples could be:

• reassign BP tasks to the Worker’s Manager when they transfer to a new job
• remove a Worker as an assignee of a BP step if they go on leave (provided there are other assignees available), and
• cancel the BP if actions are outstanding for the subject of the transaction.

Our recommendations

Here at Kainos, we’re excited for this as it will significantly reduce the amount of effort previously required with existing Manage Business Processes for Worker tasks. And more importantly, having these rules means that assignments will be made consistently, which may not always have been the case where reassignments were carried out manually.

To achieve these benefits and to keep maintenance to a minimum, we would recommend that you:

• agree and define a select amount of rules, that apply across as much of the organisation as possible
• retain existing manual steps after the automated rules has been set up as a back-stop for anything that doesn’t trigger
• use an Integration System User as the user that will auto-manage the Business Processes. 

We’re delighted to share this new Auto-Manage Business Processes feature as we believe that it can help organisations reduce the time required to maintain outstanding actions and Inbox tasks. This feature is now live in Workday, so if you have not already done so, we would recommend considering how it might benefit you and your team.

Contact us for more information

As always, we’re here if you would like to find out more about this feature. Alternatively, more information can be found on Workday Community.

Or, if you would like any support with implementing the new feature, please get in touch today by emailing workdayinfo@kainos.com.