When Workday launched in 2017, UNLV migrated all financial and human resource functions from separate systems into a single tool, used by nine Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) institutions. Everyone from department administrators to part-time instructors had to learn a new system to do their jobs. It was a difficult, but important, change for members of our campus community.
Implementing Workday made sense. Centralizing essential administrative functions into a cloud-based application makes transactions, purchases, and hires more efficient. The reporting tools shed light on departmental resources and help leadership make important decisions. That being said, a cloud application for a system as big as the NSHE comes with its fair share of challenges.
When a function doesn’t work or any given institution needs a new Workday feature — campuses, and NSHE’s System Computing Services (SCS) team work through a shared governance process to make it happen. Based on staffing levels and the number of requests in the queue, backlogs developed in responding to requests for configuration changes.
To address that challenge, UNLV Senior Vice President/CFO Jean Vock and her peers at other NSHE institutions sponsored the Workday configuration partner program in 2019 as a means to provide additional resources to SCS to help with Workday change requests, development, and testing.
Through this program, UNLV, UNR, College of Southern Nevada (CSN) and Desert Research Institute (DRI) identified experts who are engaged with their campus end-users. SCS then trained these representatives and gave them access to the Workday development tenant, an environment for users to configure and test changes within the system. This model expanded resource capacity and expertise as well as facilitated collaboration across all NSHE institutions for testing, change processes, reporting, and process improvement.
Configuration partners work in teams across institutions to fix bugs and build new features that help campus users effectively complete transactions, hire employees, or run financial reports on behalf of their department.
“Participants not only implement much needed modifications,” said Sarath Kraus, director of systems change management for Business Affairs. “They also gain valuable experience with Workday and exposure to the process of identifying a need and then researching, presenting, and configuring a solution.”
A big problem the program solved was improving communication across NSHE. Each campus has a unique organizational structure, work culture, and set of business needs. This makes solutions tricky because each campus uses Workday differently. Often, employees don’t have insight into how other campuses use Workday, which can be frustrating.
Brian Meyerpeter used to work at UNLV before moving to UNR. As someone who knows both institutions well, he understands how different operations can be. “When I went to UNR, there was this wall dividing us,” Meyerpeter said. “Once the configuration partner program began, employees from different campuses worked on projects together as a team, building strong relationships that extend far beyond the completion of a project.”
For example, UNR, UNLV, and SCS worked together to solve a difficult payroll problem. Some positions, like part-time instructors who work at two different institutions, are funded by multiple organizations. However, there was no function in Workday that could easily pay this kind of position.
UNLV’s principal systems analyst, Elora Paik, and UNR’s manager of financial systems, Tad Kelly, worked to implement intercompany payroll — allowing individuals to create cost allocations and make adjustments in Workday so a position’s payroll may be easily split between two different institutions.
This configuration was necessary, so it would have gotten done at some point, but not so quickly. “The analysts in SCS simply didn’t have the time to do all the investigative work for Workday challenges and change configurations,” Paik says. “As a configuration partner, I can extend their resources to get changes through shared governance faster.”
What do the configuration partners mean for everyday Workday users? “It’s our hope that the program will result in high quality and timely implementations of changes, fixes, and system enhancements,” says Deborah Whitten, NSHE’s Workday director. “We want to make Workday a valued resource and an asset for NSHE employees.”
In any given month, dozens of problems are identified and solved by a configuration partner. On the docket is building worktags for capital projects, collective bargaining agreement functionality, improving reporting, and much more.
UNLV Workday Configuration Partners
- Chelsea Meggerson, financial services
- Gualberto (Berto) Rodriguez, financial services
- Nathan Frieders, financial services
- Elora Paik, financial services
- Karla Kirk, financial services
- Anthony Guinan, human resources
- Danielle Gross, human resources
