In an effort to utilize the best software that addresses a variety of specific enterprise challenges, and to minimize the cost and time to maintain on-premises software deployments, more and more businesses are selecting best-of-breed SaaS applications for every functional challenge. For human resources and finance software, many companies are choosing Workday’s Human Capital Management (HCM) Suite as an optimal solution. Workday is a SaaS application that depends on systems and applications within an organization — even those from different vendors — being able to communicate seamlessly with each other. Businesses that use Workday HCM software need to be able to integrate Workday’s applications with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems from different vendors, like Oracle, SAP, or PeopleSoft. In order to implement Workday as a solution, organizations need a seamless way to integrate Workday with an existing ERP.
The Workday HCM suite
Workday’s HCM Suite covers an extensive number of applications that merge talent management, recruiting, payroll, benefits, financials, and more into a single platform. It includes everything from an applicant tracking system (ATS) to back office HR management software — and everything in between. Workday recruiting software helps recruiters find, engage, and hire candidates as well as manage referrals, social media integration, offers, sourcing analytics, and onboarding. Its workforce management software assists with performance management, career development, compensation, and staff planning and organization. Meanwhile, Workday’s back office management applications help organizations run their payroll and benefits operations and to manage their expenses.
Challenges of integrating Workday with ERP systems
Complex custom integrations
Creating connectivity and integration between HR applications and an ERP system is a common challenge for businesses. As recruiters find potential candidates and track applications, the information needs to be synchronized with databases and ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle, and PeopleSoft. For businesses to operate efficiently, all of their systems, services, and applications need to be seamlessly integrated. Businesses often attempt to address this need by creating custom connectivity and implementing point-to-point integration. This approach applies custom code directly between two endpoints, creating a tightly coupled dependency between them. While this type of integration is manageable in an environment with only a few systems, the complexity of custom integrations increases exponentially as additional systems and services are added over time. Increased complexity, meanwhile, brings increased costs — as organizations are forced to divert ever more time and resources to building and maintaining integration in an increasingly fragile and inflexible architecture.
The need for a hybrid solution
As cloud-based mobile and SaaS applications become increasingly integral to business operations, the need for a hybrid integration platform that can bridge such applications to on-premises ERP systems becomes ever more critical. Businesses that opt for a best-of-breed SaaS strategy require a hybrid on-premises and in-the-cloud integration solution that can go wherever the very best systems and applications take them.
Navigating ERP system vendors
Another challenge organizations often face as they attempt to integrate Workday with their ERP systems is the often opaque structure of the ERP vendors themselves. Businesses often find it difficult to navigate the sprawling internal organizations of the most common ERP system providers in order to identify and locate the right group or person to go to with questions, requests for assistance, or concerns. This, in turn, complicates the already difficult task of integrating these very complex systems.
MuleSoft takes the pain out of integrating Workday with ERP software
With out-of-the-box connectivity, MuleSoft’s Anypoint™ Connectors make it easy to connect Workday to hundreds of popular on-premises and SaaS applications, like SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, NetSuite, Salesforce.com, and ServiceNow. Users can easily build integrations within Anypoint™ Studio, MuleSoft’s graphical design environment, and deploy them directly either to Mule as an ESB or to CloudHub, a cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS). These and many other components are all a part of MuleSoft Anypoint Platform™and work together to provide businesses with a comprehensive integration solution, both on-premises and in the cloud. This next-generation platform provides a complete set of solutions to help businesses overcome the challenge of integrating such systems in a matter of days, not weeks or months.
Moreover, MuleSoft has developed deep and close-knit relationships with major ERP system vendors, so we’re able to navigate their complex structures and collaborate with key partners to quickly deliver effective integration solutions.
Key Benefits: Connect and scale
With MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, you can quickly and efficiently build integrations to Workday that are proven to scale over time. Connect Workday to other SaaS and on-premises applications no matter where you are along the continuum toward full cloud migration.
With an underlying platform that contains a single development environment and reliable multi-tenant architecture, Anypoint Platform connects Workday and other Human Capital Management (HCM) applications to all your other third-party enterprise applications, whether they are in the cloud or behind your firewall. It also offers a future-proof solution that scales over time and will accommodate new features and upgrades to existing apps — and even new apps that have yet to be developed.
Connecting Workday gives you a single view of your employees from hire to retire, your HR system as the single source of truth for employee information, and the ability to provision and de-provision employees in real time. Anypoint Platform makes it possible to strengthen, extend, and scale your HR system across the enterprise by unlocking the back office and unwinding your legacy systems.
Connect Workday to the Enterprise
- Extend Workday to the rest of the enterprise to connect new applications and unwind legacy systems
- Solve your enterprise integration needs both in the cloud and on-premises with MuleSoft’s hybrid integration model.
- Replace costly, custom point-to-point integrations.
- Eliminate manual data entry and loss of information, while providing employee record consistency across systems
Get up and running quickly
- Connect to applications instantly with our Anypoint Connector for Workday — fully supported and up to date with Workday API access to pre-built connectors to top HCM, CRM, and financial applications
- Get up and running quickly with pre-built templates for HCM (eg. Workday to SAP Payroll) and ITSM (eg. Workday to ServiceNow)
Streamline employee management
- Simplify data migration between Workday and your legacy HR or ERP system in real time or batch single view of employee data across HCM, financials, ERP, CRM, and SCM applications. Streamline management of employee data from HCM applications to downstream back office systems.
- Optimize recruiting, onboarding, and retention efforts. Mobilize your back office data by connecting Workday solutions to custom-built mobile applications
Learn more about how you can seamlessly integrate Workday HCM solutions with your ERP and other enterprise systems and applications with Anypoint Platform. Sign up for a free account today.