Workday 9: Transforming the Manager and Employee Experience in HR and Financials

New User Experiences for Managers and Employees Provide Easy Access to Rich Business Information and Analytics While Speeding Time-to-Action

PLEASANTON, CALIF (November 03, 2009) –

Workday, Inc., the leader in enterprise-class, global SaaS-based Human Resources (HR) and Financial solutions, is redefining the user experience for employees and managers with Workday 9, adding new homepages and streamlined business processes that work more like consumer Web sites than traditional enterprise applications. Workday 9 also delivers new project management and goal tracking capabilities; mobile applications for the BlackBerry, iPhone, and other smartphones; and support for 197 countries.

What’s New: Transforming User Experience for Fast, Easy Access
Modeled on consumer Web applications, Workday 9 adds brand new user experiences designed to make it even easier for managers and employees to get work done, complementing Workday’s more detailed “expert-user” interfaces for HR and other back-office professionals.

* While traditional business software has focused on back-office processes such as administration and accounting, Workday is delivering capabilities that are easy to access and useful for every person in the enterprise, providing managers and employees with information to get work done and the ability to act on it in real-time.
* New manager and employee landing pages feature simple, graphical access to the key capabilities people need, such as compensation, talent management, staffing, personal details, and reporting. The pages are role-based and configurable, so companies and users can select the functionality they want based on individual requirements.

What’s New: Simplified Business Processes and Collaboration
Workday has simplified business processes and added collaboration capabilities to help workers get things done more quickly.

* Accelerated inbox handling and approvals make it simple for busy managers to access, organize and take action on groups of processes awaiting review or approval.
* New business process “views” focus on the key fields required for a given transaction, while providing easy access to additional detail–making it easier for managers and employees to quickly complete tasks such as staffing and compensation.
* Users can now add personal comments to approvals and workflow steps, allowing organizational collaboration and providing context around key business processes to speed execution and improve decision making.

What’s New: Project and Goal Management to Optimize Business Performance
Workday 9 tracks individual, team and corporate goals, as well as projects and results to help organizations manage and optimize business performance.

* Workday Projects lets managers and employees track projects, workers, project budgets and spend details.
* Managers can also see projects as a component of a worker’s skills and abilities in order to determine both qualifications and real-time availability.
* Goal tracking includes weighting, goals as part of the review process, and configurable reporting.

What’s New: Enhanced Reporting and Integration Services
Workday solutions are built to provide useful, real-time business intelligence to every worker and manager in an organization, with actionable analytics, contextual reporting, and drill-down on data. New capabilities include:

* Added dimensions for drilling into and exploring aggregated data, allowing workers to gain deeper insight into business operations.
* Definition of unique calculated fields based on multiple data types such as dates, text, numbers and values. Calculated fields can be used in reporting; as conditional logic to trigger business processes, recurring processes, and alerts; and incorporated into integrations with third-party solutions.

What’s New: Expanded Capabilities for Global Enterprises
Throughout 2009, Workday has broadened its capabilities significantly to support global organizations. Major enhancements in Workday 9 include:

* Support for multiple jobs, enabling organizations to manage and track employees that regularly work across different roles in an organization.
* Support for 197 countries, including country codes, region definitions and formatting. Workday customers are currently using our solutions across more than 50 countries worldwide.

What’s New: Mobility for BlackBerry and Other Smartphones
In addition to existing support for iPhone Workday Mobile is now available for BlackBerry and all smartphones with a browser.

Comments on the News

“With Workday 9, we are delivering business applications that are all about just that – the business,” said Aneel Bhusri, Workday co-CEO. “We’ve worked closely with our customers to re-think the way employees and managers access business information – from staffing and hiring to performance and compensation – with a user experience that is simple and intuitive, yet robust enough to let people get business done quickly and efficiently.

“The addition of Workday Projects to our offering is also a major milestone, as we move to help companies manage, develop and optimize their people, initiatives, projects and spend – providing a comprehensive and actionable view of the entire business.”
Aneel Bhusri

Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO, Workday, Inc.

“When we research, discuss, review or purchase all kinds of goods and services on Amazon, our expectations are set about how systems should behave,” said Naomi Bloom, managing partner at Bloom & Wallace. “We expect new features to appear frequently, without disrupting our productivity or interfering with our ability to do simple things in a simple way. We expect our privileged data to be secured but available when we need it and also used in cross-customer aggregations to inform our buying options and experience. We expect to find not only the means of executing complex business events but also a wealth of embedded intelligence to guide us and help us to avoid mistakes or misunderstandings. This is today’s world of Web-delivered consumer automation, and every employee, manager, applicant, etc. expects–increasingly demands–that same level of capability in their organization’s business systems,” Bloom continued. “Early attempts at HR self-service were nothing more than distributed data entry, and it felt like the HR department was asking us to do their work. Workday feels much more like a consumer application, one that helps me do what I want to do in the way I’m already used to working.”
Naomi Bloom

Naomi Bloom, managing partner, Bloom & Walace
Workday Manager Experience – Human Resource Software

Manager Experience Wheel

Workday has collaborated closely with customers to completely re-imagine the user experience for business applications. Now managers and employees can quickly and efficiently access the information they need and immediately take action to get work done.

About Workday
Workday is the leader in SaaS-based enterprise solutions for global human resources and financial management, providing new levels of business agility for a fraction of the cost of buying, deploying and maintaining legacy on-premise systems. More than 100 customers, spanning mid-sized organizations to global Fortune 500 businesses, have selected Workday. Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Financial Management use modern, standards-based technologies to provide an unparalleled level of agility, ease-of-use, and integration capability. For more information about Workday, please visit www.workday.com.

© 2010. Workday, Inc. All rights reserved. Workday and the Workday logo are registered trademarks of Workday, Inc. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

Source: Workday

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