Overview of Workday HCM Core Concepts

Supervisory organizations group workers into a management hierarchy. The foundation of Workday HCM, supervisory organizations contain the jobs and positions that you hire workers into. You can also configure compensation, security, and business process workflows based on your supervisory organization structures.

When setting up your supervisory organizations, you need to consider your staffing strategy and budgeting needs. Every supervisory organization is associated with a staffing model. Staffing models determine how jobs are defined and filled, provide various levels of control and flexibility over staffing, and support different staffing goals.

Job profiles make up your job catalog and are the foundation of your jobs and positions. A job profile is a generic description of a job and contains all characteristics of that job, such as special skills, training, or other qualifications. Every worker in Workday must have an assigned job profile.

The Workday compensation structure consists of compensation packages, which group together compensation grades and plans. Compensation grades provide guidance with reference to pay ranges, and compensation grade profiles allow for localization. Compensation plans provide various types of pay components such as salary, hourly, and allowance plans.

The Workday security framework applies to your entire Workday application, securing all data. With configurable security, you can control what a given user can view and act on in the system.

We can divide the security framework into three components: functional areas, security policies, and security groups. Workday divides every product, such as Workday HCM and Workday Recruiting, into distinct functional areas. Workday HCM includes the following functional areas: Staffing, Core Compensation, Organizations, and Personal Data. Functional areas group together domains and business processes. Each domain and business process has a corresponding security policy, which grants access to certain security groups. A security group is a collection of system users. Membership in a security group dictates the secured items (e.g., tasks, reports, business objects) that a worker can access.

A business process is a set of configurable steps that completes a larger overall task, like hiring or terminating an employee. In short, a business process controls the "what," "who," and "when" necessary to accomplish a task:

The business process definition specifies the steps, groups, and timing of the workflow. For example, the definition identifies the security group responsible for each step, notifies the workers in these groups, and recognizes when each step is complete so the process can progress to the next step.