Introduction to Integrations

In this blog we’ll provide a high-level overview of what an integration is, then look at the different types of integrations that Workday® has to offer. Along the way we’ll try to define some key terms or acronyms that you may come across as you explore these different Workday integrations.

This blog does assume that you understand the basics of Workday’s Business Object model and that web service requests are how customers interact with the data in those business objects. Those web service requests could come from the User Interface (UI), or they might come from application programming interfaces (APIs).

With that in mind, let’s take a look at integrations.

Workday Integration Architecture

Integrations are the method by which data is moved between two systems. In a Workday context, an inbound integration inputs data into Workday, while an outbound integration outputs data from Workday.

While the full Workday product suite is very comprehensive, customers always have other systems they use. This could take the form of an email/communications stack through Microsoft or Google, or cybersecurity products that offer Single Sign On (SSO). For those systems, integrations are a critical piece of the puzzle, and Workday offers customers several different types of integrations.

The next part of the blog will provide an overview of each integration type, as well as some sample use cases intended to highlight why you might use it.

Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB) – Inbound

What: This integration allows you to import data from a spreadsheet into Workday in bulk.

Why: An Inbound EIB allows you to complete multiple transactions of the same type en masse. For example, you can upload bonus payments for 5000 employees from one spreadsheet.

Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB) – Outbound

What: This integration allows you to export data from Workday in a Workday XML format. It also supports the transformation of the XML into a different structure or format, such as CSV or JSON.

Why: You have a custom report that needs to be provided to one of your vendors on a weekly basis or need to retrieve data from one of the public web services that Workday provides and provide it in JSON format to your IT team so they can make an update to a different internal system.

Image: An Outbound EIB Integration System that is taking a Custom Report, transforming it, and delivering it to an endpoint.

Connectors

What: These tools are pre-built templates provided by Workday. Some templates exist to deliver data to, or import data from, specific services and vendors (e.g. Salesforce.com, or ADP). Others are vendor agnostic, exporting or importing data in Workday-defined XML format.

Why: One of your benefits providers wants your benefit enrollment data in a specific, industry-standard format. Workday has built a template that conforms to that standard, and using it saves you having to build a complex custom report and integration from scratch.

Image: An inbound, vendor specific, connector that takes employee retirement savings data from Fidelity’s system and transforms it so it can be loaded to Workday.

Workday Studio

What: This separate tool is an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It allows you to build more complex, customized integrations. While the integration does reside in your Workday tenant, it cannot be modified with the UI. It can access data from any Workday Web Service operation and can involve multiple sources of data.

Why: Your company needs to get pre-hire data from an external ATS, and the integration needs to not only create the Position for the new hire, but then put the pre-hire into that newly created Position. The data being extracted is split into different components which are being used in separate business processes.

Image: A sample of a Studio ‘assembly’. This example takes a report from Workday and causes it to loop several times, while counting the number of times it does so. This might be necessary to trigger downstream transactions or processes.

Orchestrate

What: Orchestrate is a web-based development environment. It allows for the creation of complex integration workflows without writing coding, using drag-and-drop functionality.

Why: You need to use data entered as part of a business process to trigger a different business process. This involves extracting data from the first business process and transforming it so that it can be imported as part of the second business process (This process is known as a Boomerang Integration.)

Joel from Arkansas has written a couple of fantastic blogs on Orchestrate. Check them out here, and here.

Image: A sample Orchestration that takes a RaaS report, looping through each row and obtaining specific data, then creating a new file containing that data that is saved elsewhere.

Workday Web Services (WWS) API

What: The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) API supports a LOT of different Workday operations. It allows developers who are not trained on non-Workday development tools to build integrations using any development tool they wish.

Why: Your IT team handles all integration development at the company, and have a lot of experience with non-Workday development tools. The SOAP API allows them to build Workday integrations using another tool (e.g. Mulesoft) and supports almost all operations available within Workday.

Workday REST API

What: The REST API provides access to a more limited number of Workday operations than the WWS API.

Why: Similar use case to the WWS API, and limited to smaller transactions.

Reports-As-A-Service (RaaS)

What: Use either the WWS API or REST API to extract a Custom Report you’ve built in Workday.

Why: You want to load the data from a Custom Report you built into another application (e.g. Power BI) so that it can be combined with non-Workday datasets and used in a dashboard or presentation.

Image: The Report-As-A-Service URLs for a Custom Report. Highlighted options demonstrate the Simple XML and CSV options for the reports format. These URLs can be copied into a third-party tool to obtain the data in the report. Workday Security still applies here, and a Username & Password will need to be provided when attempting to access this URL.

Conclusion

In this blog we’ve introduced you to the concept of integrations and provided a high-level summary of the different types of integration offered by Workday. In my next blog, we’ll take a deeper dive into the Connectors integration type, and explore the common components that exist across these pre-built templates.

Author: Luke from Washington