Setup Considerations: Business Processes
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of business processes. It explains:
- Why to set them up.
- How they fit into the rest of Workday.
- Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
- Security requirements and business process configurations.
- Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.
What They Are
As the cornerstone of many applications, Workday business processes route tasks to authorized users based on their membership in security groups and organization hierarchy. You can also configure conditional logic to scale business processes globally using localized content.
Business Benefits
Workday business processes:
- Make it easy to connect people, applications, and services by enabling you to set up configurable process flows.
- Enable administrators to configure all aspects of business processes without help from information technology staff or other consulting resources.
- Save time and speed adoption by enabling you to copy and modify over 550 preconfigured business processes.
- Ensure that each decision maker has access to the latest data by easily integrating with third-party applications as part of your workflow.
- Supply an audit trail after a business process completes.
- Speed up communications with business process participants by using business process notifications.
- Use business process security policies to determine who can participate and the actions they can perform.
Use Cases
Business processes can cover a wide range of scenarios to help you:
- Standardize and track any kind of request or approval.
- Create separate hire business processes for various positions within an organization.
- Track purchasing requests from planning to completion and provide a record of who completed each transaction in the process.
- Track changing issues and attitudes in your organization by distributing questionnaires and collecting the results.
- Automate any contract process by distributing documents for review and electronic signature.
- Automate assessments of student applications for admission.
Questions to Consider
Questions | Considerations |
|---|---|
What kinds of procedures would you like to automate using a Workday business process? | You can create your own business process, or you can copy a Workday delivered default business process for a particular function and customize it. Example: The Hire, Change Legal Name, and Change Job default business process definitions. |
What types of electronic signature would you like to use? | Workday offers its own electronic signature option as well as the Adobe Sign and DocuSign. |
What type of requests, approvals, and request reporting would you find helpful? | You can consolidate the request processes (Example: purchasing, employee time off, building maintenance) across your organization, eliminating requests submitted over the phone, email, messaging, or word-of-mouth. Workday offers delivered reports and custom reporting when you use the Request business process. |
What types of business process notifications would you find helpful? | You can create notifications triggered by the status of the business process as a whole (Example: completed, denied), or when the business process enters or exits a step.
You can also delay when a custom notification is sent by configuring a notification delay on your business processes. |
What kinds of reports do you wish you had? | You can report on completed business processes, provide an audit trail of changes, and report on business processes awaiting action. |
Recommendations
Copy a default business process definition to any supervisory organization and tailor it as necessary. You can create different versions of the same business process for different organizations. Business process logic is inherited, so a subordinate organization uses the business process definition of the superior organization unless you specify a custom definition for the subordinate organization.
For optimal business process performance, Workday recommends that you limit the number of steps on a business process definition.
We support a maximum of 72 consecutive, non-manual steps on a business process. A non-manual step is a step that's automatically processed by the system without user interaction. Example: Not required steps, an
Integration
step, or a Report
step. If you have business processes with 72 consecutive, non-manual steps, Workday recommends that you evaluate the business process definition to reduce the number of these consecutive steps or configure a rule-based business process definition with conditional steps. You can use rule based business processes that select a routing structure based on the goal of the business process, the role of the initiator, or another condition.
Set up your organization structure to optimize business process routing, security, analysis, and reporting. Workday routes business process steps according to:
- Organizations: Groups of workers, cost centers, and other resources.
- Roles: Responsibilities assigned to a worker.
- Hierarchies: Structural attributes that establish parent-child relationships or reporting relationships between organizations.
- Locations: Geographic attributes.
Use the
Tenant Analyzer
report to verify your tenant configuration against Workday recommendations.Use the
Business Process Exception Audit
report to find all business process definitions with critical errors.Requirements
Configure and maintain the business process definition features you want to use:
- Approvals and actions.
- Related links.
- Rule-based business processes.
- Condition rules for step or validation requirements.
- To Do tasks and checklists.
Limitations
You can't associate all step types or actions with any business process. Access the
Business Process Configuration Options
report to determine which step types and actions you can associate with a business process.Tenant Setup
Use the
Edit Tenant Setup - Business Process
task to manage settings for:
- Attachments
- Comments
- Delegation
- Electronic signatures
- End dates
Use the
Edit Tenant Setup - Notifications
task to manage settings for notifications.Use the
Edit Tenant Setup - System
task to manage business process time zones.Security
Workday doesn't secure business processes to domains, but each business process definition has its own business process security policy that determines who can:
- Start the business process.
- Perform action steps within the business process.
- Perform actions on the entire business process.
- Approve, correct, cancel, and rescind steps.
- Reassign tasks.
Each step within a business process definition is associated with a security group that defines who is responsible for that step.
To view the security policy for a business process, select: from the related actions menu for a business process definition.
Business Processes
Workday delivers a wide range of preconfigured business processes. Access the
Business Process Definitions
report to view business processes in your tenant.Reporting
Reports
| Considerations
|
Business Process Configuration Options
| Determine which steps and actions you can associate with a business process. |
Find Events
| Search and filter business process events by:
|
Business Process Cycle Times
| Monitor the average process time (days) for business process types and steps. |
From the related actions menu for any business process event select:
| Access business process details:
|
Business Process Transactions Awaiting Action
| View all business processes for:
|
Pending Business Process Notifications
| View pending business process notifications.
You can drill down into specific business processes for a functional area, including the recruiting functional area. If you currently use the report to identify pending recruiting notifications, you can select all recruiting business processes in the Recruiting prompt option. |
Integrations
You can set up an
Integration
step on a business process that launches an Integration Process
event. The event launches an integration system associated with one or more business processes. You can select from a list of integrations. Workday Web Services (WWS) and REST APIs are available to help with integrations.
Connections and Touchpoints
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.