Welcome to the December edition of our monthly e-newsletter, Workday@Yale, with information on the University’s transition to the campus-wide unified Human Resources, Payroll and Finance information system, Workday.
How will Workday Facilitate our Work in April 2015?
We’re almost three months away from Release 1 Go-Live of Workday@Yale. As we move toward this transition, the Program Team will be providing more detail around how your day-to-day work may change as a result. For example, today at Yale, it takes up to eight clicks to access or make any changes to your benefits information (aka your benefit “elections”) from the Yale Portal. By the time you reach your benefits page, you likely have three or four browser windows open. Your information is located on a static page, with beneficiaries broken out in a separate chart at the bottom of the page.
In Workday, you can access your benefits information with just two clicks from the Home Page. You can sort, filter, export to Excel, or print the information. All benefits in which you’re enrolled are listed in one chart, including any dependents and beneficiaries you’ve elected for each benefit. Workday is interactive, so you don’t need to click “back” to retrace your steps; you can navigate to most pages in Workday with a few clicks of the mouse.
View your Benefit Elections with just two clicks.
Other Ways in which Workday will make our work day run more smoothly include:
Preview Workday@Yale
Be on the lookout for more Community Meetings in January and February, where you can view a live demonstration of Workday's functionality, look and feel. Register for an upcoming Workday@Yale Community Meeting by visiting http://calendar.yale.edu/cal/workday.
Feedback from attendees has been positive, and includes comments such as:
Curious how Workday may look when we go live at Yale University? Watch a brief video demonstrating Workday's basic functionality by accessing the Workday@Yale Preview. This preview will familiarize you with Workday and how easy it is to use. The video also shows several self-service activities such as direct deposit and maintaining your personal information.
Each month, this section introduces a new Workday Core Concept to help prepare you for the transition to Workday. You can start building your knowledge of Workday now by reviewing the full repository of Workday Core Concepts, here.
Community Perspectives
The Workday@Yale Change Management team recently interviewed Jack Beecher, Senior Director of Business Operations for the Professional Schools and Academic Support Units to learn more about his experience as a member of the Position and Compensation Management Service Group.
CM: Have you been involved in past system implementations at Yale?
JB: Yes! The Oracle implementation really set the stage for the future and helped us to develop a common language, but it was a different time then, and the idea of “software as a service” hadn’t been conceptualized in 1998.
CM: Have you encountered any issues?
JB: As with any system implementation, the underlying presumption is that Yale is homogenous; clearly Yale is not. The one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t and shouldn’t work, which people are growing to understand. Workday should serve most of Yale very well, and then we will accommodate where it’s unavoidable. Workday is a big step in the right direction, and I wish I had another ten years at Yale in order to experience it fully.
CM: What do you like about Workday@Yale?
JB: Workday’s ability to adjust and respond to the changing environment is an improvement from the old systems. They’re inventing solutions as the problems arise.
I also like the idea that you can log into Workday and see what work others are depending on you for, as well as the work you are expecting to be done by others. I believe users will find the interface intuitive and easy to use. Workday’s architecture is preparing us for the next ten years.
CM: What can you tell us about the work being done on the Workday Finance workstream?
JB: Workday Financials will offer a much more effective and easier to use chart of accounts. Workday@Yale is not an upgrade to existing software; it’s a transformational approach to how we use our administrative financial systems, and people are eagerly anticipating this modernization.
Program Update
The Workday@Yale Program is well into the Testing Phase, which will end in early February. Training materials to support HR Information and Payroll Processing are being developed and tested as well, for use beginning in February and March. The Release 1 Timeline below is focused on activities leading up to the first Workday deployment at Yale and highlights past accomplishments, current work, and next steps.
Next Month
In the New Year, you can expect to:
- Receive further information around training plans and materials that will be available as we approach Go-Live.
- View live demonstrations of Workday functionality at Community Preview Meetings
- See a new “Workday is Dawning” poster across campus, the second poster in the awareness-building campaign. Check out Poster #1 below!
