FHLB Topeka optimises Workday operations with Smart Shield
“Small teams don't have time to keep redoing the same processes to help other teams. You need to be able to work through your own task list without having to stop and help other people.”
About the Company
FHLB Topeka is a regional financial institution with approximately 250 employees, providing liquidity and funding to financial institution members throughout Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma. The bank operates with a lean HRIS team, where Jennifer Typer serves as the sole HRIS engineer managing all Workday HR processes. Maintaining security, compliance, and operational efficiency is critical in their regulated environment.
From Workday implementation to operational reality
FHLB Topeka implemented Workday in 2023 for HR and early 2024 for accounting. While Workday brought improved functionality, the small HRIS team faced challenges managing proxy access, testing, and security. Jennifer Typer, the bank’s sole HRIS engineer, recalls, “So right after go live, I did all the testing, and I would work with accounting. If they needed to proxy, we would sit in a room together and I would run through the process so they could see it. It took a lot of my time.”
The repetitive nature of testing and managing proxy access was challenging. Jennifer says, “It felt like Groundhog Day, doing the same thing over and over every day just to move to the next step because I had to make sure everything was working right.”
Small HRIS team faces Workday Proxy and security challenges
As a financial institution, FHLB Topeka had strict audit and compliance requirements, but their lean HRIS team structure created bottlenecks. Only Jennifer and one recruiter had elevated proxy access, forcing accounting and other teams to rely on workarounds. Auditing was reactive and manual.
Jennifer explains, “We did not run audits regularly and it was all reactionary versus seeing what was happening in real time. If somebody made a change they shouldn’t have, it could take months before it was flagged.”
Manual tracking of role assignments and security changes consumed hours of the small security team’s time, “Even just doing the security roles, our security team was spending a full day tracking down everything.”
Maintaining compliance while ensuring efficiency was a constant struggle, “Small teams don't have time to keep redoing the same processes to help other teams. You need to be able to work through your own task list without having to stop and help other people.”
Automating Workday Proxy access and security with Smart Shield
Recognising the need for an automated solution, FHLB Topeka turned to Smart Shield. Jennifer reflects, “We always knew we needed stronger controls around proxy access, and that's why I was the only one. We just needed to figure out what we needed and how to get it.”
Smart Shield allowed the team to expand proxy access safely while maintaining strict security. Jennifer describes the immediate benefits, “As soon as Smart Shield was implemented, we could demonstrate to our security team and our leadership that it truly was masked. We could ensure that compensation and business partner private information is controlled by us.”
Flexible masking and profile management gave role-specific access without exposing sensitive information, “The ability and the ease of creating different profiles so people can have different masking levels is very beneficial. If we can see something in production, if we're all in one profile and it's all masked, that doesn't really help us. Having different profiles is extremely helpful.”
End users across HR and accounting could now perform their own testing independently, reducing bottlenecks and saving time, “All of our end users and accounting can now do all their own testing versus me reaching out to business partners to do testing for us. It saves a lot of time and frustration.”
With proxy users increased from 5 to 15, the HRIS team could focus on strategic projects rather than repetitive support tasks. Security, compliance, and audit confidence were strengthened simultaneously, with controlled access, masked data, and improved documentation.
Partnership with Kainos
Jennifer praised the Kainos team for their support, “Everyone on the Kainos team that I've worked with has been very helpful, very informative, very patient with all of our questions. The implementation was very easy, very thorough, very efficient.”
Looking forward, FHLB Topeka plans to leverage Kainos automated solutions to streamline Workday processes and audits further, building on the success of Smart Shield to continue improving efficiency, security, and operational confidence.