Workday Extend can accelerate your business transformation, do you want to know how?
You probably have heard of Workday Extend (Workday Cloud Platform in the past) at altitude or maybe some colleague has mentioned it to you, but you might not have a clear idea on what it is and what it can bring to your organization. The truth is Workday Extend is already very powerful at the moment, but the expectations are astonishing and we will show you why.
What is Workday Extend?
Let’s keep it simple, Workday Extend is a development tool that brings Workday customers the ability to create apps or extend functionalities within Workday. You have the ability to create apps that run Workday Technology. Apps are linked to internal or external data, data can not only be visualized in a friendly way, but also be updated very easily. Applications fit your security set-up, enable you to create workflows and custom business processes. By using Workday Extend workers performance will be boosted.
Above is a summary on what Workday Extend is and brings, we will go over this schema in the following sections.
Connect and unite
You may be using external applications to perform some activity outside of Workday, maybe some functionality Workday is missing, Workday Extend enables you to have them all integrated in one system. This is a tendency, we have seen it in the past, we used to have our cell phone, our mp3 displayer, our camera, and now everything is integrated in one. Workday Extend will help you take the next step and take advantage of the latest technologies Workday brings uniting them together.
Data analytics and access made easy
As said, Workday Extend can incorporate functionalities that were not used to be inside Workday, and what that enables customers is to perform analytics to that new gathered data via PRISM, create reports, statistics, and graphics.
Workday Extend applications can also take advantage of Reports-as-a-Service (RaaS), known to any Workday Integration consultant are a great feature to gather data. We can also take advantage of Workday REST APIs which can be invoked without additional authentication. Together with this we also have access to WQL and build reports on the fly using the existing Data Sources in a SQL-like syntax.
User friendly
Workday Extend uses the exact same appearance that Workday has, called Presentation Services, which gives applications a great UI appearance. In BNB we follow Workday’s best practices for page display and users get familiarized with applications very easily. Not only that, with Workday Extend, we can link our applications to new tasks that can be invoked from the search bar or related actions.
Another feature that Workday Extend brings is the ability to use Connect Services. This is a very simple but useful service, which allows you to send notifications within your Workday Extend application. Workday features such as Notification Templates can be used with Connect Services. Last but not least, Workday Extend applications under certain constraints, can be made available through the Workday Mobile App.
Logic Performance
We all know data does not always come in the format needed, specially when data sources are external, sometimes data needs an extra logic layer before it can be presented. For such Pmd Scripting was recently released, it allows to include some basic business logic at the Presentation Services layer.
Sometimes data needs to be gathered from different sources, Workday Extend enables you to perform such logic taking advantage of Function Services, which were initially conceived as a way to create our own microservices that could orchestrate other services or implement more sophisticated logic.
However Function Services will be deprecated soon, as performance was unsuitable for well performing microservices. BNB is conscious of such limitations and has designed an alternative infrastructure using AWS to cover the use cases previously covered using Function Services.
Conclusion
As seen Workday Extend brings a variety of services and options that are adaptable for every customer bringing applications development inside Workday possible. It enables access to multiple data sources and it can bring external applications inside Workday which can in the end improve analytics and usage of data at all scopes. It is user oriented and can be adjusted to your needs. Now, the question is not “Workday Extend can enhance your business, want to know why?”, the question now is:
“Workday Extend is part of the Workday ecosystem, want to take part of it?”
We are Workday Extend partners globally, do not hesitate to contact us if you want to talk about your extensibility.