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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Setup Considerations: Hierarchies

Setup Considerations: Hierarchies

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of hierarchies. It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How it fits 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 It Is

Using hierarchies, Workday establishes parent-child relationships or reporting relationships between organizations. Hierarchies are structural attributes of Workday objects, but they don't store definitions of individual objects, such as positions, workers, or accounts. Along with organizations and roles, hierarchies are part of the foundation that provides configurable and contextual security within Workday. The way that you structure your hierarchies influences many important Workday functions, especially role assignments, planning, and reporting.

Business Benefits

Hierarchies are designed to evolve as your company, business needs, and locations grow. Setting up hierarchies helps streamline business process routing, security, analysis, and reporting. You don’t assign hierarchies to workers. The hierarchies are inherited from the worker’s organization. You can configure security so that subordinates of a role at a higher level in a hierarchy automatically inherit the role, which eliminates additional configuration as your organization grows. You can set up hierarchies so that subordinate hierarchies automatically inherit business processes from parent hierarchies, but you can also configure unique processes for any subordinate.
Hierarchies don't always indicate a subordinate relationship. In many instances, setting up hierarchies simply groups entities and enables you to eliminate redundant steps. Example: Instead of assigning roles individually, you can assign roles once at a higher level and organizations that are included in that hierarchy can inherit the role assignments.

Use Cases

Workday has 2 types of hierarchies, superior-subordinate and roll-up. Superior-subordinate hierarchies define the common organizational structures. Example: Management chains. Roll-up hierarchies support multidimensional reporting and are typically used for grouping and reporting. Example: District > Stores.
These organization types have a corresponding hierarchy in Workday. Example: Academic Unit has a corresponding Academic Unit Hierarchy:
  • Academic Unit
  • Business Unit
  • Company
  • Cost Center
  • Fund
  • Gift
  • Grant
  • Location
  • Program
  • Project
  • Region
Product or Feature
Use Case
Academic units.
Create academic unit hierarchies to:
  • Support roll-up reporting.
  • Enable academic appointment business processes.
  • Provide for business process and role inheritance.
Funds for education and government.
Group related funds into hierarchies to:
  • Define which roles can view fund details.
  • Easily navigate between related awards.
  • Generate reports on grouped funds.
Grants.
Group related grants into hierarchies to:
  • Enhance reporting.
  • Route grants for approval.
  • Assign roles to grants.
Locations for financial management.
Set up location hierarchies to:
  • Align physical locations with geographical reporting requirements.
  • Assign storage locations for shipping goods and for procuring services.
  • Match locations with regulatory regions.
Management-level hierarchies for Human Capital Management (HCM).
Set up management level hierarchies to:
  • Categorize job profiles based on management types.
  • Compare similar roles across an organization.
Project hierarchies for financial management.
Configure project hierarchies to:
  • Streamline project creation by eliminating manual configuration steps.
  • Generate detailed reports that enable you to compare costs, revenue, time, and progress for projects.
Spend category hierarchies.
Create spend category hierarchies to:
  • Simplify procurement and expense searches.
  • Generate reports and complete analysis.
  • Model spend categories based on industry standard taxonomies.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
Would your company benefit by grouping office locations geographically for reporting, financial, or regulatory purposes?
If you need to assign roles by location, set up location hierarchies. The first level should be a one-to-one mapping of location hierarchy to each physical location. The second level can group each location into logical groups that can roll up to the global level.
Would your organization benefit from having a consistent automatically applied organizational hierarchy?
Configure your organization hierarchies so that:
  • Subordinates of a role at a higher level in a hierarchy automatically inherit the role.
  • Subordinate hierarchies automatically inherit business processes from parent hierarchies.
  • You can also set up unique processes for any subordinate hierarchy in instances in which inherited processed aren't relevant.
Does your company have locations in more than 1 country?
Consider setting up company hierarchies and virtual plan hierarchies to plan for and report on transactions in multiple currencies across subordinate companies.

Recommendations

Use these calculated fields to work with data in your tenant:
  • Lookup Hierarchy
    : Displays data with a hierarchical structure and the hierarchy node in a single instance.
  • Lookup Hierarchy Rollup
    : Displays hierarchical data for analysis.
Use these search prefixes in prompts and global searches:
  • cch:
     For cost center hierarchies.
  • loch:
     For location hierarchies.

Requirements

No impact.

Limitations

  • Organizations can’t roll up to more than 1 hierarchy if they eventually roll up to a common hierarchy because the organizations would then be counted more than once.
  • When a hierarchy structure is in effect, you can only create subordinate organizations of subtypes that are valid within the hierarchy structure.

Tenant Setup

You can set access restrictions for organization hierarchies by selecting
Restrict Org Hierarchical Prompt to Visibility
Everyone
 on the
Edit Tenant Setup - System
 task. When you select this check box, the
Active Organizations by Hierarchy
 option on organization prompts display only hierarchies with visibility of everyone.

Security

Configure at least one of these domains:
Domains
Considerations
Business Process Administration
 in the System functional area.
Enables you to edit the
Create Project Hierarchy
 business process.
Create: Company
 in the Organizations and Roles functional area.
Enables you to create companies and company hierarchies.
Create: Cost Center
 in the Organizations and Roles functional area.
Enables you to create cost centers and cost center hierarchies.
Create: Region
 in the Organizations and Roles functional area.
Enables you to create regions and region hierarchies.
Manage: Grant Hierarchies - Create
 domain in the Grants Management functional area.
Enables you to create and edit grant hierarchies and assign related roles.
Manage: Location Hierarchy
 in the Organizations and Roles functional area.
Enables you to create location hierarchies and maintain location hierarchy organization assignments.
Set Up: Academic Unit Hierarchies
 domain in the Academic Faculty functional area.
Enables you to maintain academic unit hierarchies.
Set Up: Spend Categories
 domain in the Common Financial Management functional area.
Enables you to setup spend categories and view related reports.

Business Processes

No impact.

Reporting

Reports and Report Fields
Considerations
View in Tree Viewer
 report
Enables you to view organizations, organization details, and levels within a hierarchy in a single view.
Hierarchies with Duplicates Exception Audit
 report
Enables you to view organizations included multiple times within the same hierarchy.
Reports:
  • View Company
  • View Company as Of
  • View Cost Center
  • View Cost Center as Of
  • View Region
  • View Region as Of
Enable you to navigate organization hierarchies 1 level at a time, making it easier for you to find a specific organization.
Prompt - Cost Center Hierarchies and Subordinates
 report field
Enables you to select a cost center hierarchy in custom reports.
Prompt - Location Hierarchies and Subordinates
 report field
Enables you to select a location hierarchy in custom reports.

Integrations

No impact.

Connections and Touchpoints

Hierarchies interact with nearly every Workday feature. 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.