Five tips for successful data catch-ups during Workday deployments

Is your Holiday Balance information correct? Do your managers have the right people listed in their team?

Read on to discover how the right approach to ‘data catch-up’ can help achieve deployment success, and benefit from the tips shared from our very own Workday HCM expert Jonny Williams.

The need for data catch-up arises during the final build and test cycle of the Workday deployment, as event transactions continue to build up in legacy systems. To ensure that these latest historical transactions are available to users, it is important to undertake a data catch-up activity, ensuring that historical data is loaded into Workday. This is a significant cutover activity, and its completion is a key readiness milestone for go-live.      

Whichever approach your organisation has chosen to deploy Workday, there are several data catch-up factors you must consider. Here’s my top five:

Prepare Early

It’s important to highlight the need for data catch-up during the Plan stage of your Deployment project. We’d recommend that you identify the types of transactions that will require data catch-up, advise on how the data can be captured and action any changes that need to be configured in the tenant to help support this process, ensuring everything is in-place before End-to–End (E2E) testing begins. 

Define Data Catch-Up Business Processes (BPs) 

Data is loaded into Workday using BPs defined with you during the project. Whilst it’s possible to use these BP definitions when loading the data, they may include steps and notifications that could slow the loading down for little benefit, or trigger hundreds of notifications to be sent to users.

It can sometimes be better to create new ‘data catch-up’ versions of the BPs, with fewer steps, simpler routing and/or no notifications. These help to make data loading easier and more efficient. At Kainos, we recognise the value of these data catch-up BP definitions, so they form a standard part of our deployment offering. Using insights gathered from a wide variety of deployment projects, we have developed a set of criteria that can be used to determine which BPs require data catch-up versions and what they should contain. We work closely with you to agree the final definitions of the BPs and then configure them so that they can be tested before being ready to use during cutover. 

Load in Bulk (where appropriate) 

In cases where data catch-up volumes are sufficiently large, it may be more efficient to load data in bulk rather than via manual data entry. We work with you to determine when bulk upload would be beneficial and to choose the right tools to do the job, such as Workday’s Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB). We provide Data Templates that help facilitate the capture of data in a way that ensures the information is already in the correct format to load into Workday. We also deliver sets of Data Validation Reports that Customers can run to help validate that the data has been loaded successfully. 

Involve Data Owners and Subject Matter Experts 

Having the right people involved throughout the deployment is crucial. Consider those who helped to define and test the original Business Processes, those who know about the data that needs to be loaded and those that will execute the loading itself—by involving the right people everything from planning through to execution can be done effectively and with less waste. Their involvement should include;

• scoping and prioritisation of the data to be caught up.
• defining and testing catch-up BPs,
• managing expectations with stakeholders and,
• planning and resourcing the data catch-up itself. 

Simplify Decision Making 

As mentioned, there can be several decisions to make when preparing for data catch-up. This can be a lot for some organisations to take on themselves, so we’ve consolidated our knowledge and experience from supporting data catch-up on numerous Workday deployments and produced guidelines for our customers to help simplify their decision making.

These guidelines include:

• timelines for when data catch-up activities should be planned for and executed
• how to determine whether data catch-up BPs are required
• what they should include/exclude, and
• when Bulk Data Load tools should be used and how to configure them. 

 
Want more information about our data catch-up guidelines?

If you would like to learn more about these tried and tested guidelines, or any other information on our deployment offerings, email workdayinfo@kainos.com and we’ll be in touch.