HRPWS Release: support for streamline initiative

April 19, 2021

Update (6/7/2021): HRPWS updates to support the streamline initiative are in production.

Over the past year, we have been working on an initiative to streamline how we get HR/Payroll Data from Workday into the Enterprise Data Platform (the portfolio of services including Enterprise Web Services & Events and the Enterprise Data Warehouse). The purpose of this initiative is to transition away from extracting Workday data primarily with files to having a Web Service pull data using Workday-native APIs and Reports as a Service (RaaS).

We are currently using this streamline approach to support Finance Transformation with our Financial Web Service (FWS v2) and are experiencing the benefits of:

  • increased reliability – reduces our dependence on file creation which has proven to not be performant and will hit size limitations over time potentially resulting in stale data.
  • increased capacity – more automation will be in place that will greatly reduce the amount of manual work that is required with the current approach.
  • reduced complexity – by having our own Web Service pull data directly from Workday, we are reducing the number of steps and platforms that data must flow through before it gets to you.

HRPWS EVAL scheduled for May 10, 2021

We are now ready to transition the HR/Payroll Web Service (HRPWS) to take advantage of the streamline approach.

We are also taking this opportunity to improve the quality of the data as follows:

  • Improving the correctness of the data to better reflect the data source (Workday)
  • Reflecting current data only – HRPWS will no longer provide historical data. The EDW will be the resource of choice for historical data going forward.
  • Some data will be pulled from different Workday resources than they are today
  • Record filtering/deleting has been dramatically reduced in order to better reflect source data
  • Field data manipulation has been eliminated (e.g. extra spaces and characters restored)
  • Although we are NOT removing any fields, we are setting some fields to NULL in preparation for deprecation

Detailed list of upcoming changes in HRPWS

https://wiki.cac.washington.edu/display/hrpws/2021/03/19/HRPWS+Updates

These changes WILL IMPACT you! Please take a moment to review these changes and assess how they will affect your solution(s) and how you will adapt. If you have any questions, please contact us and we will support you.

We are planning to make these changes available in HRPWS EVAL on Monday May 10, 2021. The schedule for deploying into production is contingent on your evaluation experience and schedule for adapting (if needed). Please reach out to us as early as possible if you have any questions or concerns, so that we can ensure a smooth transition experience for you!

Support

Please contact us at hrpws-support@uw.edu if you have any questions or would like to provide feedback.