What is Workday Extend?

While software product names can sometimes get creative, Workday tends to go with descriptive names and that trend definitely applies here. Workday Extend literally "extends" Workday capabilities by allowing you to create your own applications for interacting with users from within the Workday platform itself. Workday provides many built-in applications for interacting with employees and keeping track of the data needed to help run your business, such as the application used in the Create Expense Report task.

The page displayed above shows the form fields an employee would fill in to submit an expense report. This application would likely work well for most businesses just as it is, since expense reports are handled in a pretty standard way across most businesses. 

Your business, however, will have particular needs that are not handled by any existing Workday applications. For instance, you are a super innovative international aero-space company that just developed technologies which allow commercial orbital flights for only half a million dollars!!! While we know that price still puts this wonderful experience out of the reach of most people, there is still a very big market for this, and the company would like to publicize the innovation by giving one adventurous lucky employee a free orbital flight. To inject a bit of merit-based fairness to the fun, the online sign up list is open to all non-senior level employees and every employee can "star" up to 3 people on the sign-up list(not themselves) for an extra chance in the lottery pool. The idea being that the employee who has done the most good work with the greatest number of people across the company would get more stars and chances to be picked.

Now Workday does not have an existing application that can do this voting/lottery/contest thing that someone in your company dreamed up yesterday, but with all your employees already on the Workday platform, Extend allows you the ability to create an application to do this yourself relatively simply.

Workday Extend development includes a few different things, but you'll likely start with PMD scripting, which uses JSON-like syntax to script the presentation of user interface elements like form fields and submit buttons onto web pages.

Yes, code is intimidating to most, but the recent addition of a visual view of the code makes Extend a little more accessible to those without a background in writing software.

You can also create a custom task like "Sign up for orbital flight lottery" for users to use to get to your new application. 

Your application might include a custom business process where supervisor approval is required for employees who have worked fewer than 3 years to be eligible for the lottery.

Sure, this lottery is for a one-time thing now, but this data you're collecting tells you how a lot of your employees feel about each other(i.e. the lottery balls didn't bounce her way and she didn't win, but Linda the entry-gate security guard got the most stars. Maybe she deserves a raise?) A custom report on this application data would show you this.

Year-end bonus conversations start, and someone suggests the lottery data should factor in, but they aren't sure how. Whatever decision gets made as to the ultimate use of this data, Orchestrations allow manipulating and transforming this data as JSON or XML. This flexibility allows delivery of this data to third-party applications via APIs.

Workday Extend empowers organizations to go beyond the built-in functionalities of Workday by giving them the tools to build custom solutions that meet their unique needs. Whether it’s for enhancing workflows, creating specialized applications, or analyzing employee data in new ways, Workday Extend opens up new possibilities for businesses looking to innovate and improve their operations within the Workday platform.

Author: Nexon from Florida