Explain Workday integration with SAP?

by Rajesh Cynix
Posted: Mar 26, 2021

Workday does the same, empowering managers and HRs to perform staff acquisition, payroll, time recording, compensation, employee planning, and recruiting in a single tap and on a single website.

Integration of cloud services with traditional ERP frameworks such as SAP is complex, and ERP integration approaches. Such as SAP's Application Connection Enabling (ALE) is limited and inflexible. Attempts to increase flexibility have contributed to the confusion. For most IT organizations, system integration is a difficult and expensive task.

We recently completed work to merge Workday with SAP S/4 HANA for the purpose of integrating HR Master info.

We had to do a lot of serialization, and the end-to-end architecture included SAP Process Orchestration as the middleware and SAP AIF as the front-end (Application Interface Framework). The style is fascinating, so I wanted to chart it in this article.

Workday – SAP Integration:

All employee-related data were applied to separate displays one by one in Workday as part of the overall company process. However, in SAP, these data are grouped into different information types. Such as personal information, bank account information, payment information, work schedule, and so on.

Info-type is a table of information in SAP that stores logical data. Info-types are only intended for use in the SAP HR module. It is a category of information, and the details for the employees will be stored in info forms.

SAP HCM (SAP Human Resource Management)

SAP-HCM, or Human Resource Management, also includes new modules such as e-recruitment, e-learning, talent growth, and performance workflow. HCM is the most recent edition of SAP-HR.

Payroll in SAP

SAP Payroll processes the contributions made by the employees. Wages, insurance, fees, and a number of other aspects are also included. Such modules, such as personal management, time management, financial analysis, and others, are integrated with payroll.

SAP Mini Master

It is a light device that is set up to hold data that will later be used for conversion into something else, or before a full-fledged SAP HR deployment.

Payroll for the Day

Workday Payroll was prepared for Workday Human Capital as part of Workday Human Capital (HCM). (HCM.) In a unified payroll and HRM approach, you will get the most out of your Workday investment.

Workday Payroll gives you direct control of your payroll processes, documents, and expenses. Orthodox methods have a number of drawbacks when it comes to payroll setup and administration.

I won't go into great detail about the technological configurations or innovations in this blog; instead, I'll concentrate on what was done with the goods and equipment. The aim is to demonstrate how we can use SAP PO in combination with SAP AIF to powerfully construct complex integration criteria like these.

In addition, the SAP Press book Serialization in AIF by Michal Krawczyk, Krzysztof uka, and Michal Michalski proved invaluable in the design and development of the GUI.

The Requirement and Its Background:

Workday was used as the SAP HR Master system in our project. Workday's HR Master data requires to be in sync with SAP ERP's HR Mini-Master.

Workday sends data to SAP PO through SOAP Protocol, and SAP PO calls S/4 HANA's Asynchronous ABAP Proxy, which then uses SAP AIF.

The Master data in question is mentioned below, and there are two sets of Master data in total.

Set 1:

Organizational Data, Worker Data, and Position Data

Set 2:

Worker Qualification - Qualification Catalogue

Since the data in each set had connections and needed to be serialized, the above data was divided into two sets. For Set 1 and Set 2 results, a virtually identical design pattern is used, and I will only display the design in place for Set 1 because it has more complexity.

So, with all three Master details — Organization Units, Positions, and Staff —

Workday is the root of reality in Set 1. These pieces of information are linked together — for example, a Worker belongs to a Position, which in turn belongs to an Organization Unit. Workday maintains the master records, and anything generated or changed in Workday had to be interfaced to S/4 HANA.

Due to the above associations, all efforts to establish positions within that organization will fail if the organization data does not flow from Workday. If the position is not established, the same applies to Worker.

Each of the boxes in the above picture reflects a separate workday code. However, each message will contain several pieces of information. Meaning, several Org Units will be repeated from Workday to S/4 HANA in the Organization Units post. The same is true for data on Position and Worker.

The place would not overpower Organization Message if Organization Message takes longer to process or fails for some purpose, as seen in the diagram below. In the same way, if there is a mistake in place or company, the worker would not take over.

The entire message will crash if Organization or Role fails, and the queue will be blocked.

Using EOIO in PO, the latter was accomplished. – Design Stage A

However, in the case of worker data, we needed the following: Worker data should stay serialized for the flow, but until the worker begins processing in the destination system, which is SAP S/4 HANA, failure of one worker should not block the queue, allowing other workers to be processed.

The following is used to do this.

For EOIO, Step 1 is set up for Organization, Place, and Worker.

Step 2:

When calling AIF from the ABAP proxy, the Worker data is broken into individual Messages. The data for Org and Position is processed as a single Logical Message, and the Position and Organization are not separated.

This is the current state of the plan — Stage B of the design.

At this point, the three messages Org, Position, and Worker arrive at S/4 HANA as EOIO and are processed in the following order: Position and Worker. Waits for the org to be processed, so the Worker can wait for the place to be processed. Worker messages are broken into separate AIF Messages — Worker 1, Worker 2, and so on — until Worker's processing turn arrives.

Workers who have been divided into separate AIF messages are no longer in EOIO and will be processed in parallel. This, however, raised concerns about the architecture. There may be several individual messages for the same worker, which must be serialized and sequenced. The rationale for this is that if a temporary worker has to be transferred to a permanent job, the worker must first be dismissed and then employed. In this scenario, recruiting can take place only after the termination, not before. As a result, we needed to include another level of serialization at this stage, and we used SAP AIF Serialization to serialize messages at the worker level.

This is Stage C, the final Design and Development phase.

While the workers are divided and the EOIO is lost at this point, the AIF Serialization comes into play at the worker level.

This is how the overall Master Data Integration design from Workday to S/4 HANA HR Minimaster was completed.

In S/4 HANA, additional sorting was added at the PO layer to ensure that terminated and non-terminated employees were processed in the order.

Conclusion

You now know how Workday and SAP will work together to strengthen Business Management. More entertaining and insightful material can be found on the learning portal. You can know more about SAP integration in Workday through Workday online training.