A closer look at technical topics

Before training gets underway later in the year, it’ll be useful to familiarise yourself with the 'Foundational Data Model', which defines how information flows throughout Workday. It ties together transactions and reporting, automatically aligning them with staff roles and permissions.

Levels of ownership

The main difference from what we're used to is that we'll no longer be using Workorders, which often lead to extremely granular sub-codes and administrative siloes, adding to difficulties around oversight and governance. Instead, ownership will be structured into three levels: Companies, Cost Centres and Projects.

Company

The University, our nine subsidiaries and the International Pathways College are each classed as one of these, with all other information sitting underneath. This new consistency will help us manage our collective financial health.

Cost Centre

These are defined units within a Company, each with an associated budget and a visible owner (usually determined by the organisation's staff structure and reporting lines). They'll let owners access real-time reports and insights.

Project

These are defined pieces of work, with start and end dates, that are associated with one or more Cost Centres. They can cover both research and non-research work, with descriptive titles for easier searchability.

Cost Centres and Projects all exist within hierarchies, with greater flexibility to reflect shifting portfolios. Here's an example: 'University of York' (a Company) contains 'Faculty of Arts & Humanities', which contains 'Department of Archaeology', which contains 'A&H - Archaeology - Teaching' (a Cost Centre). Projects will have a structure that continues to enable the detailed budget management and reporting we have now.

The programme team are still consulting and mapping this revised structure, with more details expected to emerge in the autumn.

Labelling our transactions

Instead of dealing with thousands of long, nonsensical codes as we do now (and the consequences of typos and other slip-ups), we'll instead use Worktags, which are descriptive labels attached to every transaction. Companies, Cost Centres and Projects are all types of Worktags; there are three more to be aware of, each making it easier to understand transactions at a glance: Spend Categories, Revenue Categories and Locations.

Spend Category

A product or service you're paying for (such as 'Rail/Bus/Ferries - UK' or 'Laboratory Supplies and Fixtures').

Revenue Category

Income you're receiving (such as 'Research training support grant' or 'Home - UG - Direct Admission - Full-time').

Location

The geographical site associated with a transaction (like our campus, or specific buildings within it).

We've also created custom Worktags to support other University-related needs. They'll appear automatically on transactions to remove manual steps around certain areas – VAT exemptions, HESA reporting, ledger consolidations, and so on. Because all transactions will use a combination of Worktags, we'll also be able to slice financial reports far more quickly and flexibly – an example of direct access that will further develop after our initial go-live in February 2027.

Data and reporting

Workday will become the single source of truth for the University's HR and finance data.

The transformation team is in the process of cleaning a huge amount of data from the systems Workday will replace, and preparing to load it into the platform in time for go-live. On the HR side, this will include employment data from August 2026 onwards; on the finance side, it will include data going back to July 2024 (such as closing balances from the 2023/2024 period). As HR and finance processes will all run within Workday, the data will automatically update across the platform, so there'll be no need to manually update duplicate data sets.

Workday can generate a range of reports, which align with what various York teams use now. Depending on your role, you'll have access to dashboards related to your area of work, and be able to save the favourites you use most often. We're looking at how to make the most of these dashboards and integrations to make data in Workday as useful as possible, and we'll be able to demonstrate them later in the year.

A lot of historic data won't be moved into the platform. The team will be keeping an archive of it instead, limiting access to a small group of specialist staff who may need it for auditing purposes.

Tasks and workflows

Your role determines what processes you can access in Workday, as well as the steps within them: initiating a task, approving an action and so on. Our new platforms team in IT will oversee the role categories to keep them consistent across the organisation. If you work across more than one role or department, your permissions will reflect that, making interdisciplinary collaboration easier than the silos we have now.

Our collaborators (casual staff, contractors, job applicants and so on) will be able to access certain tasks through a secure Workday portal, as will suppliers when tracking invoices. Likewise, staff who've left the organisation will have access to their payslips and other personal information themselves, rather than needing to request this manually.

There'll be a range of measures in place to avoid the 'bottlenecks' we often face: the ability to temporarily delegate a task to someone else while you're on leave; instances where multiple people have permissions to move a single process along; and automated alerts and nudges to action something you're responsible for. There'll also be more visibility on the progress of processes you're involved in, so you can track what stage they're up to.

As part of the design, we've built checks and balances into every process, making it hard to make mistakes along the way. Workday will prompt you if you've entered something incorrectly, avoiding the need for corrections further down the line. These guardrails mean we'll avoid layers of double- and triple-checking from multiple approvers, and ambiguity around policies, because processes will stick to the rules we've designed.

Updates and maintenance

York's new Enterprise Business Platforms (EBP) team, led by David Barrett, will be in charge of maintaining Workday. The platform will get major updates twice a year to keep it at the forefront of global best practice. These will usually be scheduled in the early hours of the weekend to avoid downtime or delays for York staff and their external partners.

Workday has an incredibly impressive track record around security and uptime. Using one highly resilient, cloud-based platform considerably reduces risks when compared with managing dozens of smaller systems, which can lead to a 'domino effect' when any one of them faces issues.

After we go live in February 2027, the transformation team will continue to optimise the platform based on submitted feedback, and explore how to make use of further Workday features. As an example, we're exploring how to support staff with HR and finance troubleshooting, potentially moving from Zendesk and Salesforce for those areas with Workday's in-house support service to streamline the experience even further.

Customisation and accessibility

You'll be able to customise certain areas of Workday: reorganising your homescreen to show most-used tasks, adjusting your settings for email notifications, and so on.

Workday also comes with built-in options for keyboard control, as well as a range of other accessibility features. As part of the various testing phases throughout the year, we’ll be focusing on these considerations with different audiences, including York's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Champions, to make sure the platform works well for all users.

This collaboration will also inform how the training can be as accessible as possible, and offered in a mixture of formats for groups with certain learning preferences or additional needs. It builds on the Equality Impact Assessments carried out through earlier stages of the transformation, and those planned when it comes to implementation.

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