Innovating With Our Community in a Changing World

Brandon Fahey knows a thing or two about working under pressure. It was a Thursday afternoon in late February when early reports of the Ukraine crisis flashed on the screen. The team at Otis Elevator Co. immediately sought to ensure the safety of employees in the region. There was no playbook, no tool, and the clock was ticking. As the Workday Extend functional leader at his company, Brandon got to work creating a simple way for team members to check in and share their location and status and to support evacuation. The crisis check-in solution was created using Workday Extend and rolled out in days to fill this need.

I share this story to illustrate a couple of points, besides recognizing Brandon for his important work. First, change is coming at us faster than ever before, and as much as we wish it would slow down, it seems our businesses are running at a new pace. And second, it illustrates how critical it is to have a technology platform in place that enables businesses to adapt. 

We have always taken pride in our ability to support our customers to drive change. Our true cloud architecture enables us to bring innovation to life through regular updates that allow us to adapt. In keeping with our core values of customer service and innovation, we saw an opportunity to innovate in new ways to support our customers, leveraging the breadth of our offering, our open platform, and our strong partnerships. So we launched and embraced a solutions-led approach.

From identifying ways to keep employees safe—whether it’s COVID vaccinations or safety check-ins during crisis situations—to determining how to track environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data, our solutions help customers face challenges—and fast.

Coupled with our innovation is our commitment to open the Workday platform—a journey that we started several years ago to create a world of possibilities for our customers. Through configurations, content, and services—as well as the vast resources of our Workday ecosystem—today we have a number of ways to access solutions and apps purpose-built for Workday and our customers’ needs.

• Workday Packaged Solutions available on Workday Community help enable customers—at no extra cost—to leverage out-of-the-box configurations and templates to extend the value of their Workday investment. These solutions are aimed at helping customers navigate emerging trends or streamline business process orchestrations. A great example is our VIBE Central™ solution that allows customers to track important diversity and inclusion metrics.

Equally important, many of our Workday Packaged Solutions address unique requirements across a broad array of industries, from healthcare to banking to higher education and more. For example, we have a solution to provide healthcare analytics for labor and a solution for supply or revenue forecasting for professional services. Both demonstrate how we address important challenges for our customers by helping them tune processes and surface needed insights unique to their business at an accelerated pace.

• We’ve also simplified app development with Workday Extend. This lets customers and partners securely build and deploy new business capabilities for finance and human resources (HR) faster. Whether it’s apps aimed at returning to work, management apps that help with worker engagement, or tools to help customers get a head start on app development through the Workday Extend app catalog—a curated list of app templates and reference apps—Workday Extend helps customers scale and accelerate the time to a solution for their emerging needs.

For example, Unum has developed several apps with Workday Extend, but one stands out because of the tremendous value a single app can deliver: It engages employees, cultivates a learning culture, and facilitates talent mobility. Unum’s Achievement Badge app acknowledges employee achievements while providing insight into its current talent pool. Unum offers 23 badge types for completing different learning and development program coursework, years of service, and top skills in demand across the organization in Workday. It’s been well received, and some employees have added the badges to their email signatures. We created Workday Extend to help our customers extend the power of Workday for their business needs.

• We’re accelerating innovation alongside our partners with Workday Partner Solutions, which bring data and business processes together for targeted industries and address business challenges across finance and HR. By combining industry expertise and intellectual property, our broad ecosystem of global partners helps companies deploy Workday and continually adopt new capabilities to further realize the value of their investment. 

Deloitte’s Accelerate2Zero solution is a great example of how together with our partners we help companies adapt and take action. Built by Deloitte on Workday Adaptive Planning, Accelerate2Zero enables organizations to capture scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 emissions. From there, the solution can perform cost-benefit analyses and enables dynamic emissions budget management, helping organizations to achieve the emissions targets within their ESG strategy.

Another great example of how working with our partners we’re helping companies address talent challenges comes from Accenture. To help customers address skills shortages and become skills-based organizations, Accenture has developed a solution on Workday Prism Analytics by combining Workday’s intelligent Skills Cloud and Workday Human Capital Management data with SkyHive’s Labor Market Intelligence product. This solution provides new insights and contextual analytics that enable HR and managers to identify available skills across geographies, internal workers to match skills for mobility, and leaders to drive training and redeployment based on emerging skills needs.

With Workday, we believe our customers have a platform that can evolve as they do in this changing world of work. By embracing innovation both inside and outside our walls, we continually strive to find new ways to allow our customers to leverage their Workday investments across their application portfolios and with the flexibility of Workday Enterprise Management Cloud.