Setup Considerations: Workday Strategic Sourcing

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of Workday Strategic Sourcing (WSS). 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

WSS is a platform that streamlines your sourcing-to-contract process. You can create and manage:

Projects.

Sourcing events.

Contracts.

Suppliers.

Business Benefits

Visibility and reporting into ongoing and completed sourcing projects.

Standardized process for sourcing teams and their business stakeholders.

Enable stakeholders to stay informed of project status and progress.

Quickly compare supplier prices and notify suppliers whether you award them business.

Manage supplier communication and negotiation directly within WSS.

Organize contract obligations including renewals in a centralized repository.

Gain control of approvals with visibility throughout the sourcing process.

Drive supplier onboarding and information gathering and approval in 1 place.

Use reporting and the supplier directory to have a single view of all activities with suppliers.

Use Cases

Manage procurement project processes from start to finish and collaborate with relevant teams.

Automate contract approval flows and stay informed of upcoming renewal activities.

Receive insight on key supplier information, such as risk, when onboarding a supplier.

Collect feedback on vendors from stakeholders to drive sourcing improvements.

Questions to Consider

Subject	Questions	Considerations
Pipeline	How do you want to segment access to projects across users?	You can configure Team Settings for projects in your Pipeline to enable different levels of access for: Licensed users. Stakeholders.
Pipeline/Contracts	What project and contract types and processes does your organization use?	You can define project and contract types and templated milestones for each type.
Pipeline	What project types do your stakeholders request?	You can have multiple project types available on intake or a general intake for multiple types of requests.
Pipeline/Contracts	What data on projects and contracts do you need to track and report on?	You can use default and custom fields on project and contract types that your stakeholders and licensed users can complete.
Pipeline	What current or future savings tracking do you need to track?	You can track savings on projects by setting up Savings Types in Company Settings.
Contracts	Do you need contracts approved by other parties before closure?	You can configure approval flows to occur before the contract becomes Active.
Sourcing	Are there RFx templates that your sourcing team uses today to standardize processes?	You can templatize entire sourcing events, questionnaires, and worksheets. Templatizing standard text or questions asked across your organization on RFxs helps create a foundation for sourcing managers to more quickly set up their events.
Sourcing	How are suppliers notified of awarded or rejected bids?	You can set up templates for awards and rejections. The Award Summary function can track awards in Strategic Sourcing for future traceability.
Supplier Management	What data do you need tracked on supplier profiles?	You can track and report on your configured custom field data on supplier profiles.
Supplier Management	What information do you gather for initial supplier onboarding?	You can build onboarding form templates in the template library to standardize what information you gather from suppliers.
Supplier Management	What is your approval process to onboard suppliers?	You can set up Supplier Forms to ensure that the correct parties review and approve form answers before finalizing.
Supplier Management	What performance areas do you evaluate suppliers on?	You can create a performance review template to run a performance review. The section headers in the master template dictate the performance areas that you evaluate all suppliers on.
Supplier Management	How do you engage the supplier in the performance review process?	You can determine which suppliers you invite to participate in a performance review created by you or your team.

Recommendations

Pipeline and Contracts: Create at least 1 team that has full access to all projects.
Keep fields on an intake form minimal to make it simple and quicker for stakeholders to submit.
You can choose to make multiple projects and contracts available on intake or create 1 intake form for their organization. For a small number of custom fields on an intake form or project, move all fields into Project Details.
Use conditional fields to reduce the number of contract and project types needed.
Minimize the number of Active (for projects) and In Progress (for contracts) statuses team members manually move projects through.
Use milestones to indicate approvals that occur while a project is in an Active status or a contract is in an In Progress status.
Use templated milestones to manage tasks that a stakeholder other than the owner needs to own or for reporting purposes.
Manage categories and subcategories with single select, dependent custom fields rather than the default category field for reportability. The default category field doesn’t force you to select a subcategory, and when a user selects a subcategory, the category field isn’t reportable.
Use the default two-way stakeholder sync for Strategic Sourcing projects unless there's a specific use case needing one-way sync or no sync.
Sourcing: Track custom fields for an event on the project level to ensure availability of relevant sourcing data in project reporting.
Create at least 1 event template that you share with
My Whole Company
. This template provides a foundation for users to edit and add to for their individual events.
Use Conditional Sections and Conditionally Required Questions when building event templates to reduce the amount of information needed from suppliers.
Decrease the number of event templates shared with select groups of stakeholders to reduce administrative maintenance.
Supplier Management: Use Conditional Sections and Conditionally Required Questions when building form templates to reduce the amount of information needed from suppliers.
Keep the number of supplier form questions that you map to a supplier profile at a minimum to make viewing supplier profiles easy and simple.
For onboarding information that you complete internally today, track in fields on a project rather than a form template.
Use custom fields rather than tags on a supplier profile. These fields enable standardization of terminology across suppliers and to update the data through data importers.

Requirements

No impact.

Limitations

No impact.

Tenant Setup

No impact.

Security

Domain	Considerations
In the Integrations functional area: Integration Build domain Integration Configure domain	You can transfer sourcing data between Workday and WSS using an integration.
Security Configuration domain in the System functional area.	You can set up Single Sign-On for WSS.

Business Processes

No impact.

Reporting

Report or Dashboard	Description
Pipeline Overview	The main projects dashboard that summarizes your projects and savings.
Events Dashboard	The main events dashboard that summarizes your events and spend.
Contracts Dashboard	The main contracts dashboard that summarizes your contracts.
Custom reports	The Reports page enables you to create reports based on the data you select.

Integrations

Integration Type	Description
Supplier Connector	Enables onboarding suppliers and transferring supplier information between WSS and Workday.
Award to Requisition Integration	Automates the process of creating requisitions in Workday from awards in WSS.

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.