What is Workday DevCon?

Workday DevCon is four days of using innovative technology to solve business problems. The event hosts around 1,000 developers, architects, product managers, and IT leaders both in person and virtually. During these four days, attendees had the opportunity to exchange ideas, interact with experts, and elevate their Workday experience by exploring the latest products, tools, and technologies. Over the last couple of days, there is a Workday Hackathon, where we were able to enter joint Workday Extend and IA teams.

How was Kainos’ Intelligent Automation practice involved in the event?

Nathan delivered a speaking session during the event alongside Dhruv Patel who is a Sales Engineer with our automation partner, UiPath. The session was titled ‘ Delivering Intelligent Invoice Document Processing for Workday Through Automation with UiPath’ and allowed attendees the opportunity to learn how to use UiPath to accelerate end-to-end capture of important data from invoices.

How did the speaking session go?

“The session went really well, we had 40 or so people in the room and then hopefully a lot of virtual viewers too. It was great to highlight the type of automation we can deliver, which helps to automate the user experience within a great Workday platform. The ability to showcase the combination of Machine Learning, Computer Vision and RPA to drive a better operational process on stage was great!

We had some great follow ups with attendees afterwards who have tried to do this with other tools or had never seen our ‘human in the loop’ process for ML Validation. It’s fantastic to showcase the engineering experience in the Kainos team and that by combining the IA function with our Workday experience we can deliver complex solutions.”

How was working in partnership with UiPath?

“UiPath have been great, they are the industry leader in RPA and IA and to be able to share a stage with them to show what UiPath and Kainos can do together is invaluable. Kainos have a great opportunity as leading partners for both UiPath and Workday to combine our abilities to deliver world-class solutions for our customers."

How did Kainos’ Intelligent Automation offering fit with the event?

“It was a great fit! One of the key themes from the Workday event was that enterprises need to automate. This can be through areas such as Workday Extend, Workflow Orchestration, and Process Automation. UiPath were a sponsor of the event too and they launched their Orchestration solution for Workday which adds UI and API automation to the already great Workday product.

Our Intelligent Invoice Automation solution allowed us to combine some industry-leading Intelligent Document Processing capability, with RPA to make Workday even more effective for a customer.“

Did you gain an interesting insight from other leaders/sessions?

“Yes, very much so! It’s clear that Workday is integral to how organisations function, from HR to Finance, and is a key part of the employee experience within an organization too.

Workday Extend and automation will be at the forefront for Workday to really improve the employee experience by allowing companies to develop fantastic solutions and automations within the Workday platform.

We seen a small glimpse at the possibility of what can be done and with the power of Workday and UiPath in the hands of developers, I’m excited to see what people create to impact on people’s lives.”

Summarise your overall experience at DevCon:

“A great experience, it was the first in person event for many people following the pandemic and it was great to finally interact with customers and partners!

What stood out was everyone’s pure enthusiasm for what can be done with and around the Workday platform. Every person there was focused on creating great experiences for their staff and customers, with everyone keen to share ideas and thoughts on what can go next.

For me it was great to have the ability to further develop our relationship with UiPath and to showcase to Workday and our customers the power of Intelligent Automation and what their trusted Workday partner can do to help them further accelerate their digital transformation journey.

Looking forward to going back to showcase what else we can do!!”