How workday Reports were classified?

Workday gives employees the ability to run a variety of reports based on their role. Many of these reports can be viewed as results on the screen, based on the criteria entered by the user. Results can be filtered by column and exported to Microsoft Excel for additional sorting, formatting, and analysis. Below are instructions on how to run reports, and a listing of available reports, by Workday role.
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Run a Report:

1. To run a report in Workday, search the name of the report in the search bar.
2. Click on the report name (i.e. Time Off by Period), to run the report.
3. Depending on the report, Workday will prompt the user to fill in specific reporting criteria such as Organization, Start Date, End Date, etc.
   Note: Some reports may run immediately upon clicking on the report name.
4. Once the required fields have been completed, click OK to run the report.
5. The results are displayed and can be sorted using the filter icon in the right corner, or the file can be exported in an MS Excel document by clicking the Excel icon for more sorting options.

6. Reports by Role:

Employee As Self

Report Name	Description
My Time Off	The My Time Off report provides a summary of all of a user's time off requests by date, type, units requested, and status. It also provides a separate tab with time off balances and accruals as of the date the report is processed.
Payment Elections	The Payment Elections report allows employees to view and maintain their payment elections, including bank accounts and payment distribution settings for different pay types.
My Payslips	The My Payslips report lists all payslips an employee has received by pay period and payment date. An employee can choose to view, save, and/or or print payslips.
View Printable Employee Review	The View Printable Employee Review report allows employees to access a printable version of their annual review that can also be saved in PDF format.
Benefit Elections as of Date	The Benefit Elections as of Date report provides employees with benefit elections and associated costs of all benefits in which an employee is enrolled. Employees can view historical elections by changing the date of the report.
My Contact Information	The My Contact Information report allows employees to view and maintain their contact information, including addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, instant messenger IDs, and web addresses. Employees can add new contact information, edit existing information, or delete outdated information.
My Emergency Contacts	The My Emergency Contacts report allows employees to view their emergency contacts, including the name, relationship, contact priority, preferred language, phone number, and email address of each contact person.
Find Workers	The Find Workers report allows the user to search for other employees based on parameters such as supervisory organization, cost centers, location, and manager (see management chain). Note that some filters (i.e. compensation grade) are based on the user's organization and system role.

Manager

Report Name	Description
Compensation Summary	The Compensation Summary report displays a compensation summary for their top-level organization or they can include subordinates to view indirect supervisory organizations. This report summarizes compensation dollars, but also allows the user to drill down to smaller details.
Headcount Report	The Headcount Report provides a headcount for the organization(s) managed by the user through different views; worker, position, and job. The worker level provides visibility of the headcount broken-down into active, inactive, and contingent workers. The position level shows the counts by categorizing the data into filled, vacant, available, and unavailable positions. The Job level shows the total job management counts.
Compare Team	The Compare Team report compares various facets of all the members in the direct organization of the user. Categories include multiple compensation attributes such as base pay, bonus, and merits along with comparisons in performance rating, and time of service with UM.
Compensation Analysis	The Compensation Analysis report provides a list of average compensation to midpoint ratio (Compa-Ratio) for employees grouped by supervisory organization. This report filters on workers in which the user has access based on a role of Manager or HR Partner.
My Team's Schedule	The My Team's Schedule report centralizes the schedules of one or more direct reports of the user in a comprehensive calendar view for a specified date. This includes time off scheduled to be taken or that was taken depending on the effective date entered. The option exists to view the data at the day or week level and also to scroll from one week to the other after the report is generated.
Time Off by Period	The Time Off by Period report provides time off by employee for any date range specified in the prompt. The user can select a specific time off plan (i.e. vacation, sick, conference, etc.) or leave the field blank to retrieve time off entries for all plans.
Current Employee Detail Report	The Current Employee Detail Report provides a detailed listing of various attributes at the employee level. The prompt allows the user to select their own top-level organization or include subordinates to view indirect supervisory organizations as well. Users can select the date they wish to view the report.
Staffing Activity Summary	The Staffing Activity Summary report shows staffing activity for the time period specified by the user. The report summarizes the headcount from the beginning to the end of the period selected through employment activities such as new hires, new positions, terminations, and transfers. Users can specify if they want pending and future transactions to be included.
UM Evacuation Information	The UM Evacuation Information report provides employee's emergency contact phone number, grouped by employee's manager.
UM Missing Evacuation Information	The UM Missing Evacuation Information report provides employee and manager information for employees who have not provided an Evacuation Address Only contact.
UM_Employees Primary Home Address	The UM_Employees Primary Home Address report provides a listing of primary home addresses for active employees by organizations the user supports.
UM_Emergency Contact Information	The UM_Emergency Contact Information report provides emergency contact information for employees by the organizations the user supports.

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HR Partner

Report Name	Description
Current Employee Detail	The Current Employee Detail report provides a detailed listing of various attributes at the employee level. The prompt allows the user to select their own top-level organization or include subordinates to view indirect supervisory organizations as well. It is effective dated which allows the user to see the information through different points in time.
Employees on Leave	The Employees on Leave report provides a detailed listing of employees on leave for the time frame specified. Users can determine the leave time and if the leave effects pay.
Staffing Activity Summary	The Staffing Activity Summary report shows staffing activity for the time period specified. The report summarizes headcount from the beginning to the end of the period selected through employment activities such as new hires, new positions, terminations, and transfers. The report allows the user to specify whether they want pending and future transactions to be included.
Business Process Tracker	The Business Process Tracker report tracks all business processes for the organizations supported by the user. The report shows the status of the business process (BP) and step(s) that are waiting action for the BP to be complete, along with the person assigned to complete the step(s).
Time Off by Period	The Time Off by Period report provides time off by employee for any date range specified in the prompt. The user can select a specific time off plan (i.e. vacation, sick, conference, etc.) leave the field blank to retrieve time off entries for all plans.
Compensation Spreadsheet	The Compensation Spreadsheet report allows a user to view each worker's compensation package, whether the compensation is within guidelines, the pay range penetration, and the compa-ratio.
Employees by Organization	The Employees by Organization report provides employee data for selected supervisory organizations and subordinates.
Employees and Roles by Sup Org	The Employees and Roles by Sup Org report provides for a complete view of supervisory organizations a user supports, including employees in that organization and assigned roles (i.e. Business Process initiator, Timekeeper, and I-9 Verifier).
View Open Positions Detailed	The View Open Positions Detailed report gives users the ability to see all open positions for a supervisory organization and its subordinate organizations.
Termination Details	The Termination Details report provides a view of all termination details for supervisory organizations and subordinate organizations.
UM Activity Pay All Workers	The UM Activity Pay All Workers report provides activity pay details by Worker, Supervisory Organization, Academic Period, Period Activity Category, Cost Center, or Cost Center Hierarchy within a date range.
Compensation Plan Expected End Date Audit	The Compensation Plan Expected End Date Audit allows a user to view organizations with employees who have assignments with expected end dates.
UM Visa Information	The UM Visa Information report allows users to view active employees with corresponding visa information. Users can only access this report for employees in their supervisory organization.
UM Evacuation Information	The UM Evacuation Information report provides employee's emergency contact phone number, grouped by employee's manager.
UM Missing Evacuation Information	The UM Missing Evacuation Information report provides employee and manager information for employees who have not provided an Evacuation Address Only contact.
UM_Employees Primary Home Address	The UM_Employees Primary Home Address report provides a listing of primary home addresses for active employees by organizations the user supports.Ę
UM_Emergency Contact Information	The UM_Emergency Contact Information report provides emergency contact information for employees by the organizations the user supports.

HR Business Process Initiator

Report Name	Description
UM_Manage Job Requisitions	The UM_Manage Job Requisitions report allows a user to view all open, pending approval, frozen, and closed job requisitions. Details include job requisition, the requested completion date, and the close date.
Business Process Tracker	The Business Process Tracker report tracks all business processes for the organizations supported by the user. The report shows the status of the business process (BP) and step(s) that are waiting action for the BP to be complete, along with the person assigned to complete the step(s).
Compensation Spreadsheet	The Compensation Spreadsheet report allows a user to view each worker's compensation package, whether the compensation is within guidelines, the pay range penetration, and the compa-ratio.
View Open Positions Đ Detailed	The View Open Positions Đ Detailed report gives users the ability to see all open position for a supervisory organization and its subordinates.
Business Process Transactions of Type Awaiting Action	The Business Process Transactions of Type Awaiting Action report allows users to view every business process of the specified type that is awaiting action, who it is waiting for, how long it has been waiting and how many days it is past due.
UM Visa Information	The UM Visa Information report allows users to view active employees with corresponding visa information. Users can only access this report for employees in their supervisory organization.
UM_Employees Primary Home Address	The UM_Employees Primary Home Address report provides a listing of primary home addresses for active employees by organizations the user supports.
UM_Emergency Contact Information	The UM_Emergency Contact Information report provides emergency contact information for employees by the organizations the user supports.

Timekeeper

Report Name	Description
UM_Employee Timecard Status	The UM Employee Timecard Status report displays a list of biweekly Workday time tracking employees in a user's supervisory organization(s). It provides common timecard errors for employees including unsubmitted timecards, unapproved timecards, missed punches, and blank timecards.
UM_Employee Timecard Detail by Earning and Position	The UM_Employee Timecard Detail by Earning and Position report displays a summary of an employee's current timecard.
UM_Timecard Audit by Earning and Position	The UM_Timecard Audit by Earning and Position report displays an audit of an employee's timecard summary. It includes all actions that have occurred on the timecard including punches recorded on the web clock and those records via a timecard edit. It provides the time when applicable edits were performed as well as the name of the employee who performed them.
UM_Employees with Unmatched Punches	The UM_Employees with Unmatched Punches report displays detailed information regarding the missed punches for a given employee.
UM_Employee with Short Lunch (<20 Minutes)	The UM_Employee with Short Lunch (less than 20 minutes) report shows any employee who has clocked in and out with a meal break that is 20 minutes or less. According to Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulation, a lunch break must exceed 20 minutes. This report will help the timekeeper manage this requirement.
UM_Timecard Overtime	The UM_Timecard Overtime report displays overtime totals for all employees in a given Supervisory Organization.

Cost Center Manager

Report Name	Description
UM_Labor Distribution	The UM_Labor Distribution report displays payroll charges made to legacy values within their cost centers. Results are at the individual cost center level and are delivered in excel format in the Workday W: drive.
All Workers Costing Allocations	The All Workers Costing Allocations report shows the costing allocation and distribution for academic, regular, temporary, and student workers, including regular pay and allowances.
UM_Expired Costing Allocation	The UM_Expired Costing Allocation provides a listing of employees whose costing allocation has expired.
UM_Expiring Costing Allocation	The UM_Expiring Costing Allocation provides a listing of employees whose costing allocation will expire within the current month.
Worker's Cost Center and Legacy Value by Org	The WorkerŐs Cost Center and Legacy Value by Org report provides a listing of employees, the organizations they belong to, cost center, cost center hierarchy, and legacy value.
UM Activity Pay All Workers	The UM Activity Pay All Workers report provides a listing of employees that are receiving Activity Pay, along with the start and end dates they are due to receive payments. The report also shows the amount they have been paid as of the date the report is generated, as well as the remaining balance to pay.
UM_Compensation Merit Changes	The UM_Compensation Merit Changes provides an employee's current and proposed compensation. Merits must be uploaded to Tidemark before they will display in Workday. This report does not include lump sum merits or minimum pay band increases.
Time Off by Period	The Time Off by Period report provides time off by employee for any date range specified. Users may select a specific time off plan (i.e. vacation, sick, conference, etc.) or leave the file blank to retrieve time off entries for all plans.

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Finance Reviewer

Report Name	Description
UM_Labor Distribution	The UM_Labor Distribution report displays payroll charges made to legacy values within their cost centers. Results are at the individual cost center level and are delivered in excel format in the Workday W: drive.
All Workers Costing Allocations	The All Workers Costing Allocations report shows the costing allocation and distribution for all academic, regular, temporary, and student workers, including regular pay and allowances.
UM_Expired Costing Allocation	The UM_Expired Costing Allocation provides a listing of employees whose costing allocation has expired.
UM_Expiring Costing Allocation	The UM_Expiring Costing Allocation provides a listing of employees whose costing allocation will expire within the current month.
UM Activity Pay All Workers	The UM Activity Pay All Workers report provides a listing of employees that are receiving Activity Pay, along with the start and end dates they are due to receive payments. The report also shows the amount they have been paid as of the date the report is generated, as well as the remaining balance to pay.

Finance Business Process Initiator

Report Name	Description
All Workers Costing Allocations	The All Workers Costing Allocations report shows the costing allocation and distribution for all academic, regular, temporary, and student workers, including regular pay and allowances.
UM_Expired Costing Allocation	The UM_Expired Costing Allocation report provides a listing of employees whose costing allocation has expired.
UM_Expiring Costing Allocation	The UM_Expiring Costing Allocation report provides a listing of employees whose costing allocation will expire within the current month.

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How Data is stored in Workday : Why does it matters?

At Workday, a large part of my time is spent explaining how we are different by design. There is a long list of points we make to describe our different approach, but at the core the main difference between Workday and traditional enterprise applications is how we’ve made the object model the core of our architecture.

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At Workday, a large part of my time is spent explaining how we are different by design. There is a long list of points we make to describe our different approach, but at the core the main difference between Workday’s cloud applications and traditional enterprise applications is how we’ve made the object model the core of our architecture.

We use the object model to define both the structure of our applications (classes, relationships, and attributes) as well as the logic of our applications (methods). All parts of the object model are defined as metadata. Instead of the thousands of relational tables and millions of lines of code used to define traditional enterprise software, Workday applications consist of millions of metadata definitions. Workday uses a relational database to store all metadata and all application data. To optimize application performance, Workday keeps all application metadata and most application data in memory.

Having the application structure defined as metadata means the structure of Workday applications can be changed without having to restructure the database. Having application logic defined as metadata means that logic can be changed without coding or recompiling code. Not using the database to represent the structure of our applications dramatically reduces the number of tables needed to support them.

While the “how” part of the story is interesting, I’d like to focus more on the “why” questions behind our architecture. Why take a different approach, and why does it matter? The answer involves four critical areas for both Workday and our customers: speed, security, insight, and change.

Speed

When you think of what’s traditionally known as enterprise resource-planning systems (ERP), speed is probably not the first thought that comes to mind. But when you’re a startup that has decided to compete against large ERP software vendors, you do think about the need to move quickly. We launched Workday in 2005 using the object model, allowing us to significantly speed application development. To this day, developers can rapidly change Workday applications without having to worry about altering the underlying database, or performing any database administration operations as they build new features and products.

This is how we are able to provide customers with three Workday updates per year instead of the industry standard of 1½ years or longer for traditional software upgrades. We can quickly respond to new customer requirements, and the shorter development cycle lets customers more easily engage as design partners. (Waiting 1½ years or more to see your idea make it into production can put off even the most enthusiastic customer, and with Workday the payoff can happen within four months.)

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Security

Workday’s architectural approach means that our developers and our customers—including anyone working for them—can’t access the database where customer data is stored. All customer data is encrypted and is accessed only by the application server.

This is a huge improvement to overall security in the enterprise space. Limiting the point of access to data to only the application server is not true of any on-premise ERP implementation, and likely not true for hosted enterprise application implementations, even if the vendors offering those implementations call them “SaaS.”

Insight

Since Workday defines data relationships as relationships among objects, as opposed to the traditional way of culling data from across thousands of tables, we are able to provide reporting and analysis over transactional data that other enterprise applications cannot provide.

When running an analytics report, our system uses relationships to the primary object in the report (such as “worker”) to gather all data related to that object. The equivalent for a traditional ERP system would be to join all data across all tables relating to “worker” and send the results to the application server’s memory. Workday doesn’t have to do the joins and the data is already in memory. This allows Workday to quickly present the requested report and for customers to rapidly drill down on select dimensions of it.

For example, a Workday customer could run a report that shows not only information about all of its workers in R&D, but also how many of its senior developers work in San Francisco. This type of analysis can only happen in traditional applications when the data has been “pre-joined” and loaded into a separate reporting system. While that’s a common approach for business intelligence, it adds cost and complexity to reporting. Security has to be implemented for the separate system, and data loaded into it may be out of date by the time it’s viewed. Since our reports run on the same object structure where transactions are executed, we avoid the issues of separate reporting systems.

Change:

Maybe the most important driver for our different approach is the ability to build applications that are open to change. Even after 30 years, the requirements for enterprise software continue to rapidly change. Vendors must still deliver against longstanding requirements such as reliable transaction processing, scalable batch processing, and high volume data import, but we are increasingly challenged to address new requirements such as built-in analysis, configurable and collaborative workflow, and mobile access.

At Workday, we’ve proved our ability to satisfy the old requirements and to handle the new ones. In just two years, our iPhone application has received five new feature updates and a complete UI refresh. This level of change is unheard of in enterprise software but it is the standard for consumer technology, which is where most of the innovation is coming from.

Complex relational database architectures are not nimble enough to respond to the new requirements for enterprise applications. The path to new capabilities for applications written on these architectures is one of expensive integration and rewrites as opposed to smooth evolution.

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The pace of change in our industry makes the discussion about application architecture more important than ever. That makes it all the more satisfying to explain how Workday is different.

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What are the Different Types of Reporting in Workday?

Workday offers a number of benefits to companies in a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, media, insurance, and everything in between. And no matter what category your business fits in, it’s a near-universal truth that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Luckily, Workday offers a variety of ways to create reports that will help you better understand your company’s performance. This Workday reporting guide should provide you with an insight into the different types of reporting available in the solution.

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Different Types of Reporting in Workday

Workday offers three primary types of reporting (although some are more useful than others): Basic, Advanced, and Composite.

Basic

While Workday does offer basic reporting, its features are very simple, which makes it less useful than the other two types of reporting. At this level of reporting, you’ll be able to summarize information related to Time Off, Pay, and more. You’re also able to create basic reports as needed or on a recurring basis, and export them to Excel or as a PDF if needed.

Advanced

Advanced reporting is your workhorse, your bread-and-butter, the feature that will serve the supermajority (think 90%) of your reporting needs. This type of reporting will allow you to do fairly complex multi-data object reporting (joins on tables) and allows for complex record selection (filtering) and multi-level sorting.

Some built-in functions exist in Advanced reporting, including totals/subtotals, simple graphing (bar, pie, column), and security on data access that’s automatically applied—which means report developers don’t really have to consider security as it’s built into the system. Other useful features of Advanced reporting include outputs can be fed into an EIB, as well as easy viewing for the person running this type of reporting (so long as they have access to all the data for all the employees called by the report, of course).

Composite

Composite reporting is most often used in edge cases (the 10% of situations that Advanced reporting can’t handle). This type of reporting supports more complex calculations and is used a lot on the Finance side of Workday, but is only occasionally necessary on the HCM side. 

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Workday Reporting Example

Here’s an example of how we could use the Composite report writer to simplify reporting on a gender wage gap. Let’s say we needed to analyze whether pay (actual pay results, not just the compensation rate) for men and women is equitable in our company, over time, by pay grade.

We want to aggregate pay results into quarters for the last two years. We don’t want to look at it by individual pay period but rather want to separate out base hours pay from overtime and shift differential time. We also want totals, averages, and percentages as a ratio of one subgroup (gender) to another, as well as compensation pay grade and grand total.

The “Composite” report writer would help us get all of these requirements in one report. It would also help us answer whether there’s a base pay difference by gender or if the difference is due to the assignment of overtime, as well as if there’s an issue in some pay grades but not all of them

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Explain the set up of Supervisory org in workday?

A supervisory organization represents the structure of who reports to whom Creating a Supervisory Organization Questions for review prior to creating a new supervisory organization:
 1. Will the new manager be taking over an existing position that already exists and is a supervisory organization? If yes, a new supervisory organization is not needed.
 2. Will the new manager be going into a new position and have a brand new team?

 Create a new subordinate supervisory organization under the primary supervisory org by selecting related actions > Reorganization > Create Subordinate or Divide Organization as a related action off of the existing organization.

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Explain the Workday Compensation process?

Process configuration 

No two organisations manage their compensation processes in the same way. Workday supports your unique approach with a framework that enables you to select the plan types to include, establish pools for each plan, manage holdbacks, and allow for lump-sum adjustments and promotions as part of the compensation process. In addition, businesses can make adjustments to targets during the merit process as performance results become available.

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Insightful process flow 

The Workday business process framework (BPF) allows you to direct activities and attention to the appropriate people throughout your compensation process. For actions ranging from approval of pools to final submission, the BPF can be configured by your compensation administrator to route approvals, notifications, and alerts. Relevant, contextual information, such as market survey data, talent data, and virtually any data in Workday, can also be served up to customers at the point of action so that decisions can be driven by data.

Tailored worksheet 

When the process prompts managers to engage with their assessments, the worksheet experience is tailored for efficiency, ease, and insight. Utilising the Workday Configurable Grid, compensation administrators deliver an intuitive worksheet to managers that contain the data they require to make compensation recommendations, complete with warning notifications to help keep teams on a budget. Additionally, top-level managers have visibility into their reporting managers’ organisations and can complete merit tasks on behalf of their team. The smart panel feature on the grid can be configured to display specific worker attributes, providing managers with additional information. 

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Event management 

Business doesn’t stop during the compensation process. New hires, transfers, promotions, and terminations shouldn’t wait for your process to complete. Workday allows customers to coordinate events through rules which automatically handle these transactions, eliminating the manual intervention traditionally associated with compensation solutions.

Dashboard and reports :

Making decisions without all the information you need can be costly and time-consuming. Workday provides executives, managers, and administrators with dashboards, audit trails, and the reports they need for comprehensive analysis. Alerts and notifications on both desktop and mobile devices prompt users to take action. Harnessing compensation data to provide a full picture of the organisation’s pay is effortless with the pay equity dashboard, which gives you the ability to drill down and take action.

External data

Workday allows you to store and update data from other systems and sources. Salary survey data, finance data for customers not utilising Workday Financial Management, cost of living by location and more can all be brought into Workday and used in penetration analysis, reports, and pay increase recommendations. Make smarter decisions with greater insight using Workday for your compensation management.

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Data Preparation in Workday Prism Analytics:

In July 2016, Workday acquired Platfora, a leading big data analytics company that offered an end-to-end self-service data discovery platform. Since then, the same team has been working diligently with Platfora’s technology to develop Workday Prism Analytics. With this new analytics product, users can bring external data sources into Workday, govern them along with existing Workday data sources, and generate financial and HR insights that can be shared across their organizations. The product was launched at Workday Rising in September 2017, providing businesses with powerful, self-service tools to make data-driven decisions.

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Workday Prism Analytics is a native component in the Workday fabric, echoing the Power of One. This means that, on the surface, the product has the same look and feel as other Workday applications. Under the hood, it works seamlessly and securely with both Workday and non-Workday data. These requirements pose many interesting challenges, but also give us an opportunity to innovate upon our previous designs.

Operating from within the ecosystem, Workday Prism Analytics takes data pipelines from raw data to visualization. This blog post focuses on how we deal with the first part of this process — data preparation.
Workday Prism Analytics operates natively in Workday, and models its UI and UX after existing Workday products.

Interactive Data Preparation

Data preparation involves importing, cleaning, transforming, and aggregating raw data to be ultimately queried for insights. It is similar to Extract, Transform, Load (ETL), but designed for non-technical users rather than IT professionals. As a backend engineer on the data preparation team, my work enables Workday customers to build and iterate on their data pipelines.

An essential feature in modern data preparation is self-service, and along with it, interactivity. When building a data pipeline, users want to quickly make edits and receive feedback. Workday Prism Analytics embraces this idea by allowing data pipelines to be executed on a data sample. Users can immediately have a sense of what the pipeline results look like, and make changes until they are ready to apply them to the full data.

To benefit from decades of innovations in data processing, we use Apache Spark as the engine for data preparation. Also, as a distributed data processing system that can be modified for both interactive and batch workloads, Spark is a good middle ground for our hybrid use case. In fact, we started working with Spark in the Platfora product, and became more tightly integrated with it over time.

Another feature of modern data preparation is usability. Traditional ETL tools often expose a SQL interface or builder, requiring database admins to write and maintain complex queries. In contrast, Workday Prism Analytics aims to have a clean and intuitive UI that hides the complexity of SQL, and is configured with suitable system defaults tailored for Workday-style workloads.

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Bringing Data into the System
What are Workday-style workloads? As mentioned previously, Workday Prism Analytics is designed to bring together data from different sources. This means that, first and foremost, it has to be capable of parsing various file formats. These formats include plain text formats such as CSV, compressed formats such as Parquet, and Workday’s internal file formats. Each format has its own parsing options that we need to make configurable. The inputs also could contain malformed data, which should be taken into account by the system when performing calculations.

One common use case in analytics involves incremental updates, where data is periodically fetched to produce updated reports. To facilitate this, we need to handle schema evolution, and know what to do when new columns are added, when previous columns are removed, or when existing columns change names or data types.

A modern data preparation solution requires a rich data model containing extensive support for data types. Aside from primitive types (eg. INTEGER, STRING, DECIMAL) and structured types (eg. ARRAY, MAP, STRUCT), we must also understand Workday data types. One example of a Workday data type is the INSTANCE type, which represents the ID of a Workday object. INSTANCE is crucial in connecting Workday products and functionalities, and Workday Prism Analytics, as a part of the ecosystem, has to provide the same features.

Preparing Data within Workday Prism Analytics

Once data is inside Workday, our analytics product allows for a large library of row and aggregate functions to manipulate data, and also exposes data transformation operations as UI-based “transformation stages”. These operations include, but are not limited to, SQL operators such as JOIN, GROUP BY, and UNION. Transformation stages are linked together to form pipelines, allowing users to interactively navigate and visualize their changes.
Workday Prism Analytics exposes data transform capabilities such as JOIN in a user-friendly UI.

Implementing a seamless UX experience for transformations requires thoughtful design and innovation. For example, when an user creates a JOIN transformation, what should be the default output columns? It might make sense to use all columns from both sides, but if there are hundreds of columns, we risk putting unnecessary load on Workday while producing results that users might not want.

Additionally, the joined pipelines can have duplicate column names. Clearly, it would be ambiguous to include both names as-is in the output. Dropping one of them is not a good idea either, because the names can have different meanings. Therefore the system should choose a way to automatically generate unique names, which has its own collection of options and tradeoffs.

However, the biggest problem in building pipelines is arguably seeing sample results. This can be especially difficult when there are many joins in the pipeline, because join keys may not be present in the sampled data. To show better sampled results, we have to explore algorithms like reservoir sampling that selectively pick the relevant rows.

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Product Considerations

Data preparation features aside, performance is also crucial. Not only do we have to return sample results quickly, we must scale to large amounts of data in data pipelines. Moreover, our output is consumed by downstream components, including our interactive query engine for reports and visualizations. To allow for faster consumption, we materialize results in a custom file format called “lens” that is efficient for querying.

Above everything, security is paramount. Workday takes data security very seriously, with one security model across the platform. Workday Prism Analytics uses the same strict security settings we have built into all Workday products, implementing features such as encryption at rest, obfuscation of customer data in logs, and row- and column-level security that merit their own blog entries.

It is an exciting time to be a part of the Workday Prism Analytics team. Self-service analytics is becoming increasingly necessary, and we are at the forefront of making it easy for even non-technical users to learn from data.

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