Workday Cloud Platform: How Customers Are Creating Measurable Business Value

The usefulness of Workday Cloud Platform stems from the innovation, evolving business needs, and creativity of the Workday ecosystem—the growing community of users and developers across customers and services and software partners.

When we first announced Workday Cloud Platform (WCP) as a key lever to extend the power of Workday, I knew our customers would be eager to get started with developing new tools and apps to suit their unique business needs. And, since our last progress report, I’m pleased to see how quickly they are building and getting live on solutions that deliver measurable business value.

The usefulness of Workday Cloud Platform stems from the innovation, evolving business needs, and creativity of the Workday ecosystem—the growing community of users and developers across customers and services and software partners. The value of Workday Cloud Platform means that customers can not only build applications themselves, but also benefit from the functionality that others have launched.

Although the types of applications our customers are building vary, we are noticing a few common business challenges and corresponding solutions that accelerate time-to-value. Here are some big-picture examples: 

  • Design and administer employee programs, such as those that make charitable donations easier, or those for flexible work-from-home arrangements that provide transparency and choice for everyone.
  • Increase employee engagement with tailored rewards and recognition, including an easy way to submit one-time rewards or feedback to peers, or improve the merit process by letting employees define the ratio of their equity/cash compensation.
  • Consolidate performance, feedback, and compensation experiences with a way to nominate employees for promotion, or present employees with a single-page view of base and variable pay, benefits, and equity.
  • Streamline pay and reimbursement processes by automating the calculation of work-related travel using third-party transit data, and making tuition reimbursement easier by collecting degree and course data from employees prior to reimbursement.
  • Enhance financial management with industry-targeted experiences, such as with a billing application that enables a subscription business model with available plans and billing cycles, and a supplier portal that lets suppliers initiate purchase orders for goods and services. 

The compounding value of Workday Cloud Platform means that you can benefit from the journey others have taken. And, because many of our customers are interested in hearing what their peers are creating with the Workday Cloud Platform, here’s a closer look at what some of our early users have created: 

A global logistics and manufacturing company built a vehicle registration application, called Carday, to let employees register the vehicles they park at the workplace. This system is used by on-site security teams to identify the owner of a car in case of an emergency or inappropriate parking, saving time and making a safer workplace for everyone involved. Additionally, the data from this application is used to plan for changes in parking needs and to determine demand for company-provided transportation. 

An internet service company built an app called Transit Route Search so employees who travel for work by train can enter start, end, and intermediate stations to find different routes and pricing. Upon selecting a route, the app creates a quick item for an expense report. This app uses an external web service to retrieve and display train routes based on the user’s search criteria and supports both the English and Japanese languages. The company’s main goal is to improve the employee experience by keeping workers in one system for easier expense reporting.

A financial services company chose Workday Cloud Platform to explore a more complete technology stack to automate existing manual processes and enrich employee experiences. Its first project was an Education Assistance application that allows employees in Canada, the U.S., and Bermuda to request tuition reimbursement for training courses prior to registering. In addition to a greatly improved employee experience, the talent development team has seen significant time savings, and the HR services team no longer has to manually update a tracking spreadsheet. Over time, even more benefits are expected as greater access to data facilitates better reporting.

Current Workday Cloud Platform customers or members of the WCP Developer Program can browse these examples and learn what other companies are doing in the new WCP Gallery. 

Stepping back from the specific ways companies are creating value with Workday Cloud Platform—with nearly 60 applications and 1,100 active developers—we continue to look ahead. With general availability coming in 2020, even more customers will be able to build solutions that create real and immediate business value by combining the power of Workday with the ingenuity of our community.

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