Background: This blog post is the first in a series of write-ups featuring customers using Workday Extend for innovation. Each Post features the business challenges faced by the customer and how Workday Extend assisted in overcoming these challenges. For this report, Larry Carvalho, Principal Consultant at RobustCloud LLC, interviewed Eric Chung, HR Systems Strategy & Architecture Director at Sun Life that was also recorded.
About Sun Life: Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization providing asset management, wealth, insurance, and health solutions to individual and institutional Clients. Sun Life operates in multiple markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Bermuda.
Business Challenges: At Sun Life, working from home became an essential requirement during the pandemic. Employers and employees navigated the processes needed to make the new work environment more productive for business outcomes and safe for employees. As the pandemic subsided, managing Return to Office initiatives required unique applications to manage the process. Several other corporate initiatives like sabbatical programs, performance management, and education assistance requests needed a digital strategy for applications and approvals to enable rapid rollout and adoption.
Why did Sun Life choose Workday Extend? Sun Life joined the Workday Fast Follower Program designed for early adopters of Workday products in 2019. Sun Life chose Workday Extends because all the applications they needed to develop could be built on a single platform with a common data and security model. Workday Extend provided a familiar interface for users with simple integration to existing Workday features. With Sun Life covering multiple regions and geographies spread across the globe, flexibility to accommodate regional customizations was essential.
Types of solutions Built on Workday Extend Figure 1 shows the two main categories of solutions built on Workday Extend. In some cases, Sun Life needed to develop new solutions; in others, they needed to digitize and automate existing paper processes. New solutions were created without needing to factor in platform scalability since the infrastructure is abstracted from developers. Existing paper-based processes were digitized to accelerate and automate the steps securely.
What were the top three solutions built on Workday Extend?
Sun Life identified three solution areas that were key to their business success: (1) Return to Office, (2) Performance Management, and (3) Continuing Education.
A collection of applications that support Return to Office Initiatives via surveys, attestations, and requests shown in Figure 2.
2. Performance Management: Facilitating the request and collection of performance information from peers, the system aggregates the feedback and displays it to team leads and managers. See Figure 3.
3. Education Assistance Request: Using multiple objects to represent the Request and related Courses, an approval business process allows employees to request tuition reimbursement following policies for their specific region. See Figure 4.
What was the business value gained? Single-purpose applications were able to be built much faster to meet business needs. Time to value for applications was accelerated due to feature reusability. The risk was reduced due to the platform using a single security and data model. The first application took eight weeks to complete, but subsequent applications took hours instead of weeks. Approximately 10,000 employees took the return-to-work survey giving Sun Life management detailed sentiment insight to make informed decisions while finalizing the return-to-work strategy.
How did the application development organization adopt Workday Extend? Since Workday Extend allows business users to build solutions without needing IT skills, some of the responsibility and leadership in developing applications is led by the line of business, in this case, the HR Department. With enough guardrails in the Workday Extend platform to enforce security, the testing effort in the application development lifecycle is reduced. Adding new features to built-for-purpose Workday Extend applications does not affect other mission-critical applications, like HCM, running on the same underlying Workday platform.
Summary: Sun Life faced numerous business challenges and embarked on a journey to develop applications quickly. Choosing Workday Extend allowed Sun Life to focus purely on application functionality, leaving the platform management to Workday. A standard data model allowed Sun Life to integrate applications into the rest of the Workday portfolio, like Human Capital applications. According to Sun Life, this approach has allowed the HR and IT departments to respond quickly to the changing business environment with appropriate applications.
Note: Sponsored by Workday