Workday bridges business intelligence silos with Prism Analytics

Cloud applications for finance and human resources provider Workday today announced availability of Workday Prism Analytics.

With Workday Prism Analytics, customers can bring together any data – including Workday data and data from any outside source – with leading-edge analytics tools for enriched financial and people analytics to make better business decisions.

Workday Prism Analytics was designed in partnership with customers including Christiana Care, Hitachi, Shelter Mutual Insurance, Thomson Reuters, and United Technologies Corporation.

Expanding on the breadth and depth of existing analytics, this new solution is seamlessly unified across Workday products, including Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), Workday Planning, and Workday Benchmarking, empowering customers with the only cloud system to plan, execute, and analyse their business through one secure environment.

 "To successfully run a data-driven business today, you need reliable, in-the-moment insights across multiple sources of data," says Pete Schlampp, Workday Analytics vice president.

"Disconnected business intelligence systems spur data silos, but Workday Prism Analytics enables leaders to quickly find the answers they need in a haystack of data – right in the context of the finance and HR system they use to make decisions, take action, and move the business forward.

Greater context and deeper analysis for smarter financial and people decisions

To stay competitive in an increasingly dynamic environment, business leaders need to make informed decisions based on insights and analysis from data across the enterprise.

However, for many organisations, this requires business analysts to pull data from a plethora of sources and systems of record, which they then must lift and shift into separate systems to analyse, visualise, and report.

From start to finish, the process is a disjointed patchwork of security models and experiences, which often results in analysis reaching the hands of decision-makers as stale, static reports that are unreliable and delivered outside of the finance and HR systems used to run the business.

Workday Prism Analytics redefines this process – enabling organisations to access and analyse all the data they need to answer finance and HR business questions, right in the context of the Workday applications they already use to take action.

For example, with Workday Prism Analytics, customers can analyse and get richer insights into a wide range of use cases such as:

• Organisational Health – To better manage employee turnover, a technology CEO could view a dashboard on a tablet that combines regional attrition data from Workday HCM with third-party survey data on employee engagement globally.
• Financial Forecasting – To align sales strategies with financial forecasting, a general manager of an insurance company could access reports that merge financial data in Workday with sales pipeline data, enabling her to understand current growth rates and how the opportunity backlog might impact future revenue.
• Worker Productivity – To get a firm understanding on how worker overtime or absence impacts worker productivity, an HR leader at a manufacturing company could view a mobile dashboard on her smartphone that blends time off data from Workday HCM with shop floor output data from a supply chain system.
• Revenue – When reporting on performance, a financial planning analyst at a retailer can drill into reports that combine finance data from Workday with data from a point-of-sale system to quickly analyse profitability by store, region, or product line.

These scenarios are a sample of countless ways customers can take existing reporting and analytics in Workday to the next level, by leveraging new analytics capabilities available in Workday Prism Analytics, including:

• Data Integration – Customers can load and synchronise data from external sources and store it securely in the Workday cloud, where it can be searched, navigated, and viewed in a shared and secure data catalogue.
• Data Preparation – Raw data from any source can be pulled into Workday Prism Analytics, and then IT and business analysts can use intuitive, self-service data preparation tools to blend and cleanse it for analysis.
• Data Governance – Administrators have granular control to ensure the right users have access to the right data through record-level security and leveraging Workday's powerful security framework.
• Workday Prism Analytics Engine – With a high-performance analytics engine, customers can distribute insights and reports to every employee on any browser or mobile device via Workday's dashboards, scorecards, reports and Worksheets.
• Data Discovery – In future releases, Workday Prism Analytics will enable business users to navigate data and build reports interactively with drag and drop visual creation, exploration and sharing.