This past week, Stevens processed its first round of payroll using the new Workday system that was launched at the beginning of the month. A collaboration between the Office of Human Resources, the Office of Finance, Information Technology, and the Student Employment Office, the new WorkDay system has been a year in the making, and is intended to make student and faculty lives easier when recording hours and approving timecards. The new system includes a smoother and more uniform interface, better access to personal and employee information, and a mobile app. The system has gone live for all Stevens employees can be accessed via https://stevens.edu/workday.
The Workday system is a cloud-based replacement for entering time, and also replaces “six legacy systems currently used for human resources and payroll operations and management,” as the project website describes. This includes the entire ADP payroll system Stevens has been using for the past 12 years.
“Single platform, single codebase” is how Joey O’Rourke, Project Manager for the Workday transition, describes it. Tasks such as proving citizenship, changes of address or martial status, and more can now be done in the same place as one’s time-card (as opposed to previously, where employees had to visit payroll in person due to limited access to the back-end payroll software).
Even more visibility has been provided for supervisors. At a glance, one can see all the employees in their team, or even their entire department. In addition, the project team claims the user experience for members of the Stevens community has vastly improved, with both a smoother web interface and a mobile app for iOS and Android platforms. As O’Rourke explains, it provides “a lot more flexibility in terms of where you can actually do your work.”
Employees can clock in and out from their phones, and supervisors can review and approve time cards. This, of course, raised concerns with security. Mark Samolewicz, the Vice President of Human Resources at Stevens, assures his staff that “security is a hallmark of Workday, and that’s one area where it is very highly rated.”
The transition process for Workday involved “a lot of late nights,” said O’Rourke. The idea surfaced in fall of 2013 as part of Vice President David Dodd’s goal for a unified information technology system. “[Dodd] developed a vision for how administrative systems and some academic systems work work”, and the end-game is a “cohesive, seamless, integrated system,” said Samolewicz. This includes not only timekeeping, payroll, and employee management, but also recruiting and student services.
With that, the search for a new system began. The project team settled on Workday and developed an ambitious plan for the transition that ensured continuity between the old system and Workday. Initial planning and architecture began in March 2014, continuing until a prototype was available in mid-June. Then, stretching from June until February 2015, there was a “flurry of testing and configuration, and more testing and more configuration,” said O’Rourke. The actual deployment took place thereafter, and now the project team is putting on the final touches before the official finish date of April 29.
The next steps for IT is to continue integration of Workday into other parts of Stevens systems. O’Rourke’s team is working on deploying Workday Recruiting, which will replace Virtual Edge as the system for recruiting and hiring at Stevens. Further down the road, they plan on launching Workday Student, which is still in development, as a replacement for the Student Information System (SIS). This would place class registration, transcripts, and other academic data into the same interface as timekeeping and payroll.
According to Samolewicz, Stevens has been asked by Workday to be a design partner for the new module, and thus Stevens will influence the final design with cooperation from other schools like Yale and the University of Texas at Austin.
With the original Workday project coming to a close, IT has provided many resources to assist students and faculty who encounter issues with the new software. A Canvas course, which can be accessed from inside Workday, is providing training and instruction on how to use Workday for various tasks. For any issues and troubleshooting, the new IT service desk is the first point of contact students can reach out to for assistance. Additionally, IT has provided a list of FAQ as well as a comments and feedback form, both available on the Workday project page.
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