Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. As a sophisticated cloud ERP system, Workday offers powerful reporting capabilities to help organizations gain insights from their data. But what specific reporting tool does Workday actually use?
Overview of Workday Reporting
Workday provides embedded reporting features as part of its platform. The main reporting tool included with Workday is called Workday Prism Analytics. This business intelligence tool allows users to create formatted reports and interactive dashboards using data from Workday applications.
Key capabilities of Workday Prism Analytics include:
- Drag-and-drop report builder
- Pre-built templates for common reporting needs
- Interactive dashboards with drill-down functionality
- Visualizations including charts, graphs, and heat maps
- Scheduled report distribution
- Mobile optimization
For more advanced analytics, Workday also integrates with external reporting tools. The main third-party reporting platform supported by Workday is Workday Adaptive Planning. This is a more robust BI and planning tool with capabilities like:
- Multidimensional analysis
- Financial modeling
- Predictive analytics
- Collaborative workflows
- Natural language query
In addition, Workday provides open APIs that allow customers to build custom integrations with the reporting tool of their choice. Workday data can be extracted to reporting platforms like Tableau, Power BI, and others for further analysis.
Workday Prism Analytics
Now let’s take a deeper look at Workday Prism Analytics, the primary reporting tool included with the Workday platform.
Key Capabilities and Features
As mentioned above, Prism Analytics offers a variety of robust reporting functionality:
- Drag-and-drop report builder – The report builder provides a visual interface for constructing reports without needing to code them manually. Users can drag in desired fields, apply filters, add formulas, and customize the report layout.
- Pre-built templates – Prism comes with out-of-the-box templates for common reporting needs. Examples include headcount reports, compensation analysis, absence trends, recruiting metrics, and financial reports.
- Interactive dashboards – Users can build and share interactive dashboards that combine visualizations, filters, and drill-down capabilities for at-a-glance insights.
- Visualizations – A variety of chart types are available including bar, line, pie, scatter, gauge, funnel, and more. Heat maps and geographic maps can also be generated.
- Scheduled report distribution – Reports and dashboards can be scheduled for automatic distribution via email to designated stakeholders on a recurring basis.
- Mobile optimization – Prism reports and dashboards can be accessed and interacted with via mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
Underlying Technology
Prism Analytics is powered by a high-performance in-memory calculation engine. It provides fast query response times even against large datasets with millions of rows of Workday data. The in-memory engine intelligently analyzes data patterns and uses caching to optimize performance.
Both Prism reports and dashboards utilize a unified security model based on Workday’s security. All access control configured in Workday is automatically applied to reporting. So users only see authorized data in Prism based on their security groups and roles.
For the front-end, Prism Analytics uses HTML5 and related web technologies. This enables broad support across most modern web browsers without needing plugins or app downloads.
Workday Adaptive Planning
As mentioned previously, Adaptive Planning is Workday’s premium BI and planning tool. It integrates tightly with Workday but has a separate interface focused on advanced analytics and modeling. Next we’ll provide an overview of Adaptive Planning and its key capabilities.
Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting
Adaptive Planning provides sophisticated budgeting, planning, and forecasting functionality leveraging Workday data. Key features include:
- Financial and workforce modeling
- What-if scenario analysis
- Predictive modeling based on machine learning algorithms
- Rolling forecasts
- Planning at scale with global business processes
Adaptive Planning enables continuous, collaborative planning across the organization. Different teams can jointly work on budgets and forecasts in real-time. Underlying models provide guardrails and validation to help ensure plausible plans.
Reporting and Analysis
In terms of reporting, Adaptive Planning also goes beyond Workday Prism Analytics in several ways:
- Sophisticated multidimensional analysis with OLAP cubes
- Smart push reports and interactive report books
- Natural language query using plain English
- Unified self-service data discovery across Workday data
These capabilities allow power users, analysts, and executives to conduct deep data exploration across the full breadth of Workday data.
Data Integration
Adaptive Planning was designed to integrate data from multiple sources beyond just Workday. It supports live connections to external databases, cloud apps, and on-premise systems. This enables a single source of truth by blending ERP, CRM, HR, and other data.
Pre-built connectors make it easy to ingest data from popular applications like Salesforce, NetSuite, SAP, and Microsoft Dynamics. Custom data integration is also possible via SQL, API, or flat file sources.
Choosing the Right Tool
Deciding whether Workday Prism Analytics or Adaptive Planning is best depends on a company’s specific reporting and analytics needs. Here are some general guidelines on which tool to select:
When to Use Prism Analytics
- Basic formatted and interactive reporting
- Standard dashboards based purely on Workday data
- Simple scheduled reports distributed via email
- Quick ad hoc analyses by business users
When to Use Adaptive Planning
- Advanced what-if modeling and projections
- Predictive analytics and machine learning
- Unified reporting across multiple data sources
- Custom dashboards with complex interactivity
- Large scale multidimensional analysis
- Natural language query and conversation analytics
In general, Prism Analytics will meet the core reporting needs of most Workday customers. But Adaptive Planning enables more sophisticated analytics at scale.
Conclusion
Workday Prism Analytics provides the baseline reporting capabilities embedded in the Workday platform. Adaptive Planning offers more advanced analytics and modeling functionality. Most organizations can leverage Prism for their core business reporting needs. But they may also choose to implement Adaptive Planning over time to enable deeper analysis and enterprise-wide planning.
By providing both an integrated reporting tool along with the option to upgrade to Adaptive Planning, Workday offers a flexible analytics framework suitable for organizations of all sizes and maturity levels.