Effectively migrating legacy data into Workday

Less time spent on manually managing Workday data migrations; more time on adding value.

A Workday Partner wanted to help their customers implement and embrace Workday. Instead, they were finding their time was being spent on Workday data migration planning, and fixing data quality.

Their projects usually followed a similar formula of migrating data from legacy systems into Workday. They were having to manually manage each migration from scratch, leading to time being wasted on repetitive manual data work instead of adding real value to their customers..

The Main Objective

A bespoke data migration framework

The firm were looking for ways to save valuable time and resource, and speed up their data migrations. But using generic tools would require them to expand their skillset beyond Workday, an expensive distraction from their billable project time. They needed a solution that would give them the power to fix and verify input data, perform the necessary data conversion, ingest it into Workday, and provide an easy way to manage errors  - all while hiding the complexity so that consultants didn’t need to dive into ETL processes. So that’s what we worked with them to build in CloverDX.

Two Simple Solutions

1. Built in data validation for better data quality

Errors and inconsistencies in the client’s legacy data often significantly slows down project delivery, so the data migration framework needed to be efficient in identifying and validating faulty data. The data migration framework built on CloverDX validates input data, and provides easy to understand error descriptions that can be shared back to the client. Combining the technical understanding of the data with the client's domain knowledge has led to better communication and shorter project deliveries. 

The data migration process also automatically transforms the data into a Workday-friendly format and loads it directly into individual Workday modules.

2. Planning for the future with a reusable approach

As well as providing module-specific data validations and common data mappings, thereby eliminating a lot of the repetitive work, the solution can also easily adapt to new data, with the consultants only needing to configure inputs and project specific variables.

The reusable data migration approach has drastically reduced the time the consultants need to spend on data migrations, so they can focus more on helping their clients get up and running with their new Workday implementations.