Workday Integration Pattern

Transcription

1 Bristlecone Whitepaper September 2017 Author: Mr. Prashant Singh

2 Table of Contents Introduction... 3 Calling Workday From External Systems: REQUEST REPLY Pattern... 4 Extract Data Generated within Workday on Event/Schedule Execution... 6 Getting Notification for Event Executed in Workday... 7 Conclusion... 8 About The Author

3 Abstract Sync your Workday data with enterprises based on the business use case. Workday solution has now become the leader in the Human Capital Management (HCM) industry and is getting adopted by most organizations world over to make their employee engagement processes smooth. Certainly, there is a need of integrating organizations Workday data with their other enterprises applications. Integrating Workday recruiting application with your HRIS application helps in speeding the RRF closure process and managing all the intermediate processes like referral management, sourcing verification, and onboarding together with ease. If you are integrating Workday performance management, it helps in analyzing employee performances and helps in defining clear KPI settings and calculating performance based on those. The integration of these business process is must for the companies who have decided to use workday. This white paper on Workday will provide different approaches to be chosen based on the nature of business and its needs. It will list down all different integration types available with Workday cloud solution and helps in identifying the desired solution for the specific scenario. Introduction Workday Cloud Solution for enterprises Workday has released a number of applications till now after its launch. They now have a solution for every HCM and Finance related activities to provide a fine-grained solution for enterprises. Following is the list of modules available in Workday: 1 Human Capital Management This solution comes with workforce planning, recruiting, and talent management. The solution provides complete control over the organization workforce. 2 Finance Management Finance Management helps in managing expenses and revenue of the company. The procurement process helps in keeping the buying process in control and its audit control helps in applying organizational level compliance. 3

4 Workday APIs and Use cases Workday integration solution from various patterns Public API Services SOAP Retrieve, Insert, Update Delete, Bulk data WORKDAY SOAP Services for all workday Other Enterprises Report As a Service: SOAP REST CSV Scheduled Based Retrieve modules like HCM, Finance, Student Custom Reports enabled as web service Outbound Messaging Service SOAP Event Notification service Messaging Queue Service Pull Notification Messages from workday queue Workday Messaging Queues Enterprise Interface Builder File Based Integration CSV Seg: Trigger moniter download EIB Execution Environment Mobile/Tablets REST API for light usages JSON Fetch status, worker details etc Workday REST API, SAML implementation Workday came up with a lot of integration points which can be utilized to fulfill the business needs and sync data to and from Workday. This document talks about various options available for integration with Workday and other external systems. It also discusses about the integration solutions for different business problems. Calling Workday From External Systems: REQUEST REPLY Pattern Workday Public SOAP API Support The Workday Public SOAP API Support has the following benefits: Helpful when a specific set of changes need to be retrieved from the tenant or large data set volumes need to sync from Workday. For example, if you need to get information regarding Timesheet, Recruitment, Worker, and so on, the Workday SOAP API Support is used. It is the most reliable API that Workday offers. The API works well with large data set volume. The API supports data fetch, creating new data into Workday or updating an existing record. For example, you can sync worker data from workday in a scheduled manner by calling get workers method in Human Resource API. 4

5 Retrieving Information from Workday: Pagination: - You can filter the response of get, retrieve, and find operations by specifying page number and the number of records on one page. Transaction Logs: - You can specify specific business event reference in the request for which data should be extracted from Workday, for example, to get workers who have been confirmed recently. Effective Date vs Entry Date - This is another option used to filter data based on the date from when the data is updated in Workday. - Searching worker by entry date could return the list of workers in which some workers are still not effective in the workday. Use this option if scenario does not require only effective worker in the Workday. - If you need all records, just leave these two fields blank. It could result in a very huge amount of data, which should also be taken care in the integration. Workday Public Restful API Support Use cases: Can be called from light devices like mobile or to display some specific small dataset on the web Site. These APIs are exposed alongside public SOAP API to integrate Enterprise Web or Mobile application where small data set is required. One should use Public SOAP API when dealing with larger data set, and with more complex integration scenario. Supported Format: JSON Authentication: OAuth 2.0 Scenario: REST APIs can be utilized if customers need to fetch smaller set of data for a specific Workday object. Workday supports very few Workday object through REST, API which can be utilized in a specific application or device. Report as a Service Workday reports are meant for exposing data from Workday in a customized way for which no standard service is available. Customers can create custom report based on their own business requirements and can call out those from external systems as a service. Reports can expose any Workday object data based on the filter criteria set by the customer. These reports can be exposed as a service in the format of SOAP, REST, RSS, etc. It supports XML, CSV, and JSON data format in which reported generated data can be downloaded. These reports either can be called directly using their service interface in a synchronous way or could be scheduled through Workday Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB). 5

6 Extract Data generated within workday on Event/Schedule Execution Message Queue Rest API Support (Pull Pattern) Use Case: This is most reliable API to get data generated within Workday in result of execution of an event or scheduled process. Pattern: Queue Processing Maximum Message Size: 250 MB Dependency On: Workday Studio Most reliable option to receive Event information from workday. Integration created within Workday Studio can deliver messages to the Queue. To retrieve and process messages enqueued by Studio integrations on the Message Queue Service, use the Message Queue Service API. Messages are retrieved and processed in an ordered manner and are delivered only once. Using the provided REST APIs, you can retrieve and manage messages in a Queue. The Message Queue API provides Get, Post, Put, and Delete operations to do the following: Get information about the API schema and messages that aren't retrieved Retrieve a specific message Delete one or all messages in the Message Queue Message Queues are subject to capacity and data retention limits. Messages in the queue get expired in 7 days. Maximum 10 message queues can be created per tenant. Each message can be up to 250 MB in size. One message queue can store up to 64,000 messages. Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB): Pattern: Integration Interface Maximum Message Size: 250 MB Dependency On: Workday UI EIB is an integration tool provided within workday UI. It can help customers create a small integration like: 1. Triggering/scheduling a report 2. Workday data source 3. Transforming the generated data using XSLT 4. Finally deliver it to external location like HTTP and FTP 6

7 EIB stores generated data within a Workday drive that can be downloaded from external system using W drive REST API provided by Workday. It has a Notification service which can also communicate about the status of the EIB execution to the external HTTP endpoint, which in turn can be utilized by external systems to trigger further processing. Workday disables the Notification endpoint if two consecutive notification delivery attempts fail. In such cases, the user or external system does not get any notification about it. Use Case: This tool can be utilized in exposing workday report data quickly to the external system. Getting Notification for Event Executed in Workday Real-Time Notification Service Support from Workday Workday Supports real-time and near real-time business process execution notification to external systems. One can subscribe to the events of a business process within the EIB system. Workday has capabilities to notify more than one subscriber at the same time. Subscribe to Workday Business process or transaction events and launch them automatically when the selected business process or transaction takes place. In addition, you can send notifications to one or more defined endpoints. Workday provides a best-effort attempt to deliver Integration Subscription notification messages at appropriate times and processes messages as quickly as resources are available. Workday sends one notification message to each external endpoint per subscribed event. If the delivery of two consecutive notification messages fails for an external endpoint, Workday records the error, sends no further messages to that endpoint, and disables the endpoint. Workday doesn't provide guaranteed delivery or reliable messaging for Integration Subscriptions because these factors are highly dependent on the endpoint as well as the current load on Workday. EIB Based Message Delivery from Workday Based on RAAS as Data Source. (Real-Time XML/CSV/JSON format) Create a Custom report and enable it as Web Services and include it as a Data Source in an Outbound EIB integration. Payload delivery format can be XML, JSON, and CSV. Delivery method can be , HTTP, FTP, and SFTP. It can be launched on scheduled basis or can be integrated within a business process. So, integration launches the moment the business process occurs. 7

8 FTP Based CSV file Integration Support To Support old and legacy Finance and Ch.M. system, Workday delivers/extracts data to external location like FTP/SFTP. This external location should be shared with both workday and external system. As data is in CSV format, transferring the bulk data would be possible without any memory issues. Target system can read those workday generated files in chunk. There is transformation activity available in workday which can transform the workday record into the desired format before pushing data into FTP/SFTP external location. It supported xsl transformation. This Setup requires the following prerequisites: External FTP server location that should be shared with workday and external system XSL file for transformation Polling service from the external system which will check the status of Integration system execution once the execution gets completed, external system will poll the file, and write it to the system Conclusion Here, most of Workday integration approaches are covered, however, before applying these integration patterns, the user must understand the business requirement. And then, by comparing all these patterns and their usability decides on the solution. If the business use case demands real time integration the user can choose workday public API and Event based pattern to get data out from Workday. If the enterprise system supports file based approach, one can go with EIB integration which supports CSV data extract out from Workday. If one needs data with custom approach, go for Report as a Service API and build your report in workday and call it through SOAP/REST protocol. 8

9 About the Author Prashant Singh is Expert in Oracle technologies and Cloud Application Integration, working in Bristlecone as an Associate Principal within Oracle practice. He is also an expert on SAP integration as on-premise application. He has worked on number of product development projects during his tenure with Bristlecone and has experience in providing solutions for integrations on various domains, such as ERP, Procurement, SRM, and HCM. Partner with Bristlecone Managed Services to enhance your business efficiency. Our scalable application support solutions help you realize maximum value from your Supply Chain execution investments. To set up a discussion with our team, please send your inquiry to sales@bcone.com Corporate Headquarters San Jose 10 Almaden Blvd, Suite 600 San Jose, CA T (650) F (650) Partner 2017 Bristlecone Ltd. Bristlecone believes the information in this presentation is accurate as of the presentation date. The information is subject to change without notice. Bristlecone acknowledges the proprietary rights of the trademarks and product names of all companies mentioned herein. All Rights Reserved. 9

10 Bristlecone is a premier Supply Chain Advisory and Analytics SaaS+ firm headquartered in California s Silicon Valley.We have offices in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, Malaysia, and India. Learn more at To set up a discussion with our team, please send your inquiry to sales@bcone.com 2017 Bristlecone Ltd. Bristlecone believes the information in this presentation is accurate as of the presentation date. The information is subject to change without notice. Bristlecone acknowledges the proprietary rights of the trademarks and product names of all companies mentioned herein. All Rights Reserved. 10

11 An ever increasing amount of data is being generated throughout Supply Chains, which can be used as an advantage. Irfan Khan CEO Bristlecone