Take your Workday Experience sky-high with Workday Extend

Read on to find out why Workday Extend (formerly Workday Cloud Platform) can have a major impact on business transformation
Date posted
6 March 2020
Reading time
6 Minutes

Workday Cloud Platform, now Workday Extend, was announced at Workday Altitude 2017 and immediately we could see lots of use-cases, not only for our customers but also for Kainos. When we spoke to our People Support, Finance, and Recruitment teams, they saw the potential and gave us a list of applications they would love to see on the platform.

In September 2018, Kainos became a Workday Cloud Platform customer. Later that year, we went live with our first application and then became a WCP implementation partner. Since then, we have successfully implemented apps for internal use and now we're excited to be working with our customers to help them on their own WCP journeys. At the time of writing our team is currently in the process of putting our third application live!  

Why we're excited about Workday Extend

You may be asking, 'Why should I use Workday Extend? What makes it different?' Here are the reasons why Workday Extend is such a good fit for building the apps we'll be using here at Kainos.

 

workday cloud platform image 1 Power of One

The ability to access and utilise all Workday contextual data to build better, context-aware, and informed applications without the need to maintain integrations. We can also secure all our app data in Workday using the existing Security Groups and Domains functionality.

 

 width=One Experience

The applications we build will have the same look and feel as Workday and sit within our Workday application. It's so seamless that users won't know the difference between Workday and our application.

 

workday cloud platform blog image 3Scalable

Workday Extend works in the same way as Workday. As we grow our workforce, our applications automatically scale with it, without the need to provision extra hardware.

 

workday cloud platform blog image 4Secure

We already trust Workday with our most important data, so it also makes sense to trust it with the ancillary information from these apps. We can easily define our own Security Groups and customise our Domains without reinventing the wheel.

 

Workday cloud platform blog image 5Reporting

We can harness the ability to use Workday's reporting and dashboard framework to build reports that interrogate data from Workday and our applications.

 

Why your organisation should be excited about Workday Extend

It's clear that we love Extend, but what benefits can it bring to your organisation? Here are some tangible ways that your company could leverage the potential of Workday Extend to empower and evolve your business.

Replace paper or email processes

As hard as we try, there are still those lingering processes in our organisations that require email chain approvals or even paper-based signatures, which can cause problems with tracking and auditability. With Workday Extend, these processes can be transformed into cohesive, digital workflows stored and tracked in Workday.

By using business processes that can track approvals, audit the requests, and store relevant data which can be reported upon, the problems with previous email or paper-based processes disappear. Take, for example, a share enrolment scheme, a credit card request application or even the ability to allow employees to carry vacation days over to the next year.

Retire 3rd party systems

As an existing Workday customer, your corporate IT infrastructure probably looks something like ours: Workday is the core, the single source of truth for people and financial information, with several supplemental applications with specific purposes. Workday Extend gives you the opportunity to finally retire those old applications and extend Workday's power-of-one by bringing those processes and functionality into Workday. This gives your workforce a single, seamless experience. For example, at Kainos we're retiring our Rewards and Recognition application and replacing it with a new system with Workday Extend which includes improved reporting, better visibility of rewards and even better rewards for our employees.

Plug domain gaps

Workday has a huge feature set, but it doesn't always cover the needs of your specific industry. Perhaps your organisation has a unique set of needs; maybe you're doing manual workarounds or keeping spreadsheets of data somewhere. Every organisation has its own way of doing business, but with Workday Extend you have the opportunity to build it into your Workday application and tailor it to suit your business. You can build a streamlined commission payment process, or even an application to manage seat allocation on private planes!

Build a better experience for your workforce

Perhaps you want to offer more to your workforce by extending what can be accomplished with Workday currently; or you want to extend the functionality of Workday in one module, providing a better user experience for your employees. With Workday Extend, you can give your employees a better view of their absence for a single year, or the ability to request to work from home. Workday Extend offers unlimited potential to build custom extensions and applications that will make for a better employee experience.

Want to know more about how Workday Extend can supercharge your organisation, or explore our custom applications?