Workday Extend apps: What you need to know

When looking to learn more about Workday Extend apps, here's the need-to-know information along with examples of real-world uses.

Out-of-the-box solutions sometimes fall short of meeting the specific needs of an organization, which is why custom-built applications are often needed to fill the gaps. That said, building and maintaining a custom app can take up valuable resources and the result sometimes feels and looks quite a bit different from the systems that users are used to. Enter Workday Extend, which helps organizations create unique applications that are secure while bearing a strong resemblance to other Workday applications. 

What is Workday Extend?

Workday Extend allows users to create custom applications that work alongside or in tandem with other Workday applications. Workday Extend is made up of various app components to create the custom process logic, pages and appearances of the applications. The three main app components are Presentation, Model and Orchestration. 

• Presentation components are used to create unique pages and tasks, as well as elements that are presented to the page’s visitor, such as widgets and objects.
  
  
• Model components are custom objects created in the application by the developer. They include business objects, business processes, and security domains. Business objects give the developer the ability to customize data storage in objects. In business processes, the developer sets up the steps along with conditional logic and approval flow, if necessary. Lastly, security domains secure the previous two model components.
  
  
• Orchestration components are processes that creators can make to suit their needs, allowing them to produce and adjust messages while taking and uploading data from Workday and other eternal systems.

There are two different types of Workday Extend apps, internal and external. Internal Workday Extend apps are made within Workday. Examples of these are apps that allow employees to request a credit card or make a charitable donation. External Workday Extend apps are applications that are outside of Workday but can still interact with it.

Examples of Workday Extend apps 

Below are examples of real-world uses of Workday Extend that Cognizant’s Workday practice built for our clients to help meet their specific needs. Using Workday Extend gives operators the advantage of creating applications for a wide range of purposes. They are faster to build than creating an application from scratch and look and work just as other Workday applications do. 

CEO Excellence Award App 

Created by a healthcare client, this app focuses on employee experience. The primary purpose of this application is to acknowledge and award outstanding behaviors and performances of employees. It provides a user-friendly system that streamlines a manual process, increases awareness and efficiency in evaluation and selection processes, and gives easy-to-understand nominee details. 

Culture Ambassador App 

This app is an employee experience app created for a commercial real estate client. Like the CEO Excellence Award App, this app gives employees the opportunity to nominate other employees who uphold the company’s mission and values. The app was created to improve employee morale and satisfaction. Workday Extend apps allowed the developer to create the application in Workday, giving it a similar look to their other applications, making using it easy to learn. 

COVID-19 Health Assessment App 

An employee experience app created for a healthcare client, this application has employees answer a self-evaluation of their symptoms and health for the day before the employee enters work facilities. The purpose is to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the workplace. Additionally, it helped the client save money since they didn’t need to purchase a third-party vendor application. 

Annual Promotion Cycle App 

Focusing on human capital management, this app was created for a commercial real estate client to provide a systematic and controlled process for managers to use during promotion-nomination cycles. Managers nominate direct reports for promotions, giving information to back up their nomination, then the nominations are sent to the vice president for review. The creation of this application saves the team two weeks of manual work, streamlining their process.  

People Leader App 

This app was created for a consulting firm client to streamline their people-leader nomination process. It allows them to have an application integrated with other Workday technology, improving user experience. The app is used to nominate job leaders and career managers for their People Leader Awards in one place, rather than in separate apps. As other users of Workday Extend apps found, using the tool simplified their processes and created a more user-friendly experience that works on mobile as well as desktop.