Frequently Asked Questions

• Workday enables 24/7 access to information over a secure network, supporting Yale's goal to become an increasingly global campus
• Workday's SaaS/cloud delivery model allows services to reach customers with a minimal number of servers, reducing energy needs
• Workday functionality offers employee and manager self-service, enabling staff to update or access their information privately from any computer or mobile device with internet access
• Workday is designed to support the unique needs of higher education - Yale is one of seven higher education design partners with Workday

Yale is in good company with Brown, USC, Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell and Georgetown and has joined these schools on Workday’s Higher Education Strategic Advisory Board. This Advisory Board will guide the design and features of the higher education version of Workday. 

Supervisory Organizations group employees into a management hierarchy and are a required foundation for Workday HCM (Human Capital Management). They provide the structure for how faculty and staff are organized, how HR business processes are enabled, and how HR data is connected in the system. Supervisory Organizations are not used to manage finances and financial responsibilities; these are addressed primarily through Cost Centers.

In Oracle, organization refers to the “O” in PTAEO and Yale’s Organization Hierarchy. In Workday, the term organization is a basic building block for managing information that is both financial and non-financial. Organizations can be organized into hierarchies and enable reporting at different levels in the hierarchy. Roles and security can also be assigned to any level in the organizational hierarchies. Examples of Workday delivered organizations include Cost Center and Supervisory Organization.

Until March 2016, the Workday@Yale team used the term Financial Data Model (FDM) to represent the Workday Chart of Accounts, the full Workday data structure and individual segments of the chart of accounts. This terminology has been clarified and is included on the Chart of Accounts website.

Banner, Yale's Student Information System, continues to be the system of record for students' personal information. However, Workday is the system of record for student employment data. Students who work at Yale are able to do things in Workday such as view their pay slip and set up direct deposit.  

• Engage the right people in the right way throughout the Program
• Participate in Workday’s “Strategic Advisory Program,” in order to advance its direction based on Yale’s best interests
• Include members of the Yale community in the Program by:
  • Communicating early and often to ensure that Yale faculty and staff are aware of the objectives and implementation status of the Program team, as well as to understand how they can become involved
  • Leveraging community opinions and feedback to shape the Program and improve the overall quality of the implementation        

The Workday@Yale Program is a multi-year implementation originally launched in July 2013. The Program completed the Human Resources, Academic, and Payroll Go-Live of Workday functionality on July 1, 2015. The Program is now moving forward with ongoing implementations and optimizations as Yale prepares for its Workday Financial functionality roll-out, scheduled for July 2017. 

Yale’s current administrative systems are functionally and technically dated, and they are becoming increasingly difficult to adapt to today’s business and compliance requirements. Additionally, Workday provides Yale opportunities to simplify the way work gets done, reduce administrative burdens, standardize processes, lower operating costs and improve effectiveness.

Workday offers a simplified service delivery model through packaged solutions and integration tools, as well as the ability to deploy integrations to the Workday Integration Cloud. Workday is also the only unified, global HCM (Human Capital Management), Payroll and Financial Management solution delivered in the cloud that is designed with the needs of higher education in mind. Workday offers the optimal solution to support Yale's business processes and requirements.

Yale's legacy systems are customized to respond to the unique needs of each school or administrative unit, which adds a layer of complexity that must be addressed whenever system updates and/or changes are required. Workday offers configurable frameworks that can be modified and extended but prevent changes from being made to the system that will disrupt Workday's ability to offer updates in the future. Unlike customization tool-kits typically offered by traditional ERP solutions, Workday requires no coding, eliminating the need to involve programmers. This allows us to easily modify the look and feel of the application and will position our organization to make changes and upgrades more readily in the future.

For the latest updates and information on the Program or to provide feedback, you are encouraged to visit the Workday@Yale website at http://workday.yale.edu/ or email the Workday@Yale Program Team at workday@yale.edu

Every supervisory organization is headed up by an manager. All staff in that supervisory organization report to that manager.  Anyone who has employees reporting to them has the Workday role entitled "Manager." The role is not related to an employee's business title.

Workday utilizes ‘Worktags’ to classify data related to people, financial or location information. One way to think of ‘Worktags’ is similar to the use of #hashtags on some social media platforms. Hashtags enable you to search large repositories of data, in this analogy, social media posts, to identify related posts that have used a certain hashtag. These are described in detail within our Core Concepts Worktags slide.