With continued efforts to optimize the Workday platform for the LMU community, the Workday Forward project team shares the following summary of accomplishments during fall 2023, including updates, improvements, as well as what the community can expect in the early months of 2024.
Fall 2023 Updates and Improvements
- Student Employee Services: federal work study awards will now be paid out of a central budget, and there are no limits on the number of students hired by any given department. This allows supervisors to hire as many students as necessary to support their units, and no longer need to allocate funds.
- Student Employee Services: new reports provide greater transparency into students earnings. In Workday, search “Manager’s Report: LMU Student Earnings by Academic Year.”
- New reports create greater transparency into student hiring (for supervisors), overtime hours worked (for supervisors and budget managers).
- Expense Reports: distance calculations now use Google Maps to automatically calculate mileage, for streamlined reporting. Read more.
- Additional contextual information for managers on their Workday home page streamlines supervisor responsibilities. Important Dates displays time off and anniversaries for direct reports, while Team Highlights helps managers more quickly navigate to their direct reports’ pages. The Quick Review button in the “Awaiting Your Actions” section allows supervisors to efficiently review and approve time off and absence requests without having to navigate to My Tasks.
- Approval and notifications processes have been optimized for manager efficiency, impacting expense reports, invoices, journal entries, and vacation requests.
- First phase of the Discovery Boards have launched. Discovery Boards are an analytics tool that allows users to better understand, share, and visualize Workday data. The first discovery boards were launched to limited budget leadership , with phase 2 releasing to Budget Managers in December.
- Workday Mobile is live. The mobile app is available for Android and iOS devices, and allows you to complete all the tasks you normally would, from the flexibility of your phone. View the Workday Mobile reference guide for more details.
More to Come in Fall 2023
The following will be implemented prior to the winter recess:
- Save the date! Finance training on Thursday, Nov. 16 from 9 – 11:30 a.m. Topics covered will include Workday overview (9 a.m.), supplier invoices (9:30 a.m.), expenses and travel/P-cards (10 a.m.), budgets (10:30 a.m.) and Connect to Supplier Website (11 a.m.). Attend here. Another training will be held on Dec. 14 with further details to come.
- Historical financial data from Longview will be fully migrated into Workday.
- Workday Expenses dashboard will be launched.
- Further analysis will begin in the areas of grant and award reporting, role responsibilities of functional areas, and student employment reporting to further increase efficiency and transparency.
Looking Ahead: Scheduled Changes for Early Spring 2024
- Project team will assess opportunities for improved integration between Brightspace and Workday.
- Project team will further streamline the expense report and reconciliation processes.
- New reporting and procurement dashboards will be released.
- The next biannual feature upgrades will be released Mar. 9, 2024. Workday software upgrades, released every March and September, provide fixes, enhancements, and new features to increase functionality and improve the user experience. The upcoming features will be announced in further detail in LMU This Week, the LMU Workday website, and announcement section on the Workday homepage.
As a reminder, the Workday team is always here to support your usage of the system. You can submit a help ticket, refer to step-by-step reference guides using Workday Support (the life buoy icon on the Workday dashboard), or chat with the automated Workday Assistant on the dashboard. Further readings and news articles continue to be updated at lmu.edu/workday.