Customer Scenario

Human resource management (HR) is one of the few internal functions that touches every part of a business. That means a wealth of data is available to HR. It also means hundreds of connection points if you are a Fortune 100 company. Our client needed to integrate their Workday HCM implementation with internal and external systems to support the management and talent acquisition activities for 30,000 employees and more than 10,000 contractors across the globe. To accomplish this challenge, the client needed to address three specific integration scenarios: supporting existing integrations, simplify and accelerate partner integration, and reduce the number of custom integrations to the Workday platform.

Solution Approach

The good news was that partners and internal systems used a common set of data. The bad news was that each required custom data formatting, differing frequency needs, and different protocols. By creating a data lake on the AWS platform, we were able to process and store data to enable standardized integration development. By employing a variety of appropriate solutions on AWS - including SNS, Kinesis, Glue, Athena, DynamoDB, and Transfer for sFTP - we were able to take in raw data into an S3 bucket and begin processing it. The data factory created for the project started with raw data and cleansed, enhanced, and tagged the data to streamline information access.

Results

Before the implementation of the data lake, the client struggled with cost-effectively supporting internal and external integrations. This caused a heightened need for IT resources when updates were needed, or new partners needed to be onboarded. After the data lake implementation, the client was able to support integrations with more than 20 internal systems, including portals and authentication requirements, and more than 150 external partners with specialized timing and format needs. HR was also able to generate unprecedented intelligence and analytics on employee performance, risks, andtrends for its global team. As an added benefit, the standardized data access has accelerated the team’s ability to provide ad hoc requests for regulatory and compliance needs.