15 Ways to Optimize Workday BPs

Introduction:

This blog is Part-1 of a 3-part series describing 15 topics related to improving Workday™ Business Processes in one way or another. Each blog in the series will cover 5 of the 15 topics.

We start by looking at what we can do in Workday at the end even prior to a business process being triggered, next we look at things directly in the business process from inititation to complete…

1 Defaulting Data

2 Rule Based Business Process

3 KISS – Lean – Common Sense

4 Custom validations

5 Approvals, conditional approvals, advanced routing 

Example:

When hiring a new employee into a Sales Representative role, Workday can automatically default the location, company, cost center, and work schedule based on that role—speeding up the process and ensuring accuracy.

Defaulting data in Workday refers to the use of configuration rules or logic to automatically populate fields in business processes. This is especially valuable in processes like Hire, Change Job, or Termination, where many data points need to be entered consistently and correctly.

How It Improves Business Processes:

1. Efficiency Through Automation

Instead of manually selecting values like company, location, time type, or cost center every time a process is initiated, Workday can default these based on things like supervisory org, job profile, or region. This cuts down processing time significantly, especially for high-volume HR teams.

Example: When hiring into the "Retail Associate" job profile, Workday automatically defaults the time type to part-time, location to the nearest store, and assigns the correct pay group—saving time and clicks.

2. Consistency and Standardization

Defaulting ensures that business rules are applied uniformly across the organization. No matter who initiates the process, key values are set consistently, leading to cleaner data and more reliable downstream reporting.

Example: For a "Change Job" action where an employee moves from one department to another, defaulting the new cost center and work schedule based on the new department avoids mistakes and ensures financial data stays aligned.

3. Error Reduction and Compliance

Incorrect data entry can cause compliance issues, payroll errors, or misrouted approvals. With defaulting, those risks are minimized because values are auto-selected based on logic defined by the business.

Example: During termination, the default reason and last day worked can be set based on regional policies—ensuring compliance with local labor laws or company offboarding procedures.

4. User Experience

For HR Partners or Managers who don’t use Workday daily, simplifying their experience through defaulted values makes the system more user-friendly and reduces training needs.

Example: A store manager hiring a seasonal employee sees a simplified form already filled with the right defaults, reducing hesitation and errors.

And obviously besides defaulting data, overall your data quality is important, missing data may cause issues in your BPs…

Rule-based business process definitions enable business process administrators to:

• Easily update a specific business process definition without affecting any of the other definitions for that business process.

• Optimize business process definitions to meet specific business requirements.

Examples:

• Configure a different HIRE process for each country in your tenant,

Pre and Post go live there’s often a SKINNY BP for the Catchup phase so HR can enter data quickly without following all the regular approval steps

Another common practice is to have a rule based definition without approvals and to-dos for EIB use, note that for this integration security needs to be available on the BP policy.

Keep It Simple and Short,  LEAN & use Common Sense.

Don’t go overcomplicating processes, keep the number of steps and approvals to a minimum.

Don’t switch back and forth from one persona to another ...

Applying LEAN principles simplifies processes by removing unnecessary steps, making them more intuitive and efficient.

Example: Termination BP only includes notification to IT if the employee has assigned equipment.

Custom Validations aren not to be confused with BP validations those are basically  just a condition rule on an initiation step.

Meeting the validation will lead to either an error or a warning message.

Custom Validations enforce business rules by preventing errors before submission.

You create custom validations to:

• Alert transaction approvers to conditions that need more careful review.

• Display warning or error messages when workers create a transaction that meets the conditions for the validation.

• Prevent workers from submitting invalid transactions until they resolve an error.

  
  

Example: Preventing a worker from enrolling more than one spouse or in a benefit plan.

Custom validations are pre-event. What that really means for a custom validation is that some fields won't have values yet (e.g. anything BP related) and if your validation triggers, the transaction is still in draft vs being in progress.

Tailored approval logic reduces delays and ensures the right people sign off only when needed.  Remember KISS, Lean & common sense, don’t go crazy adding lots of approvals, just because you can doesn’t mean you should!

One of the first quick wins in lots of optimizations is cleaning up approval overload!

Example: Only route a promotion to senior leadership if it includes a pay increase above 10%

Often in older tenants the BP’s have approvals with condition rules attached to the approval step to exclude initiator and exclude prior approvers. But that is all they do, the advanced routing gives you more opportunities to control…

You can specifiy an alternate routing:

Alternate security groups: The Alternate Security Groups prompt includes the security groups for the step (from the security policy for the business process definition), plus Manager. If Manager isn’t a valid security group for the step, you can't select Relative to the transaction

Relative to the transaction: Determines contextual security groups for alternate routing based on the context of the transaction.

Relative to the excluded user(s) Determines contextual security groups for alternate routing based on the context of each excluded user.

There’s more to approvals like Approval Chain, Consolidated Approval, Consolidated Approval Chain, Automatic Approval, Additional Approvers and Mass Approval but they all need to be used with care to make the BP recipe work.

What's Next?

In Part-2 of this 3-part blog series, the following 5 topics will be covered:

(6) Custom reports – Worklets – Embedded Analytics;

(7) Time zone (termination);

(8) Notification (Designer) & Alerts;

(9) Services – Integrations;

(10) Everywhere (Slack & Teams)

Author: Joel from Belgium