Data conversion underway
More than 30 years of data sits in WSU’s old systems: data that will need to be updated, cleaned up, or inactivated before we launch Workday for WSU in July 2020. Where do we start? With data cleanup.
Data cleanup
As we plan our transition, it’s critical our data be as accurate and up-to-date as possible. Cleaning up records reduces the number we’ll have to convert and move into Workday.
Working collaboratively with multiple areas, we’ve already made significant progress cleaning up data. For example, we’ve purged more than 15,000 inactive accounts. That’s 15,000 fewer accounts we have to convert into Workday.
Example: The Vendor File
The vendor file holds the records for anyone with whom we have a business relationship where we make a payment to them. It’s massive – before we started cleanup efforts, it contained 120,000 vendor entries, with countless duplicates.
Due to the constraints of current systems, you can only have one address per record. That means that every time you need to send something to a new address (even if it’s part of the same organization), it creates a new record. Also, there isn’t quality control for how things are entered, so one organization might be listed under several different names or spellings.
One of the benefits of Workday is that it is sophisticated enough to keep records cleaner going forward, and to help us easily create reports. To make sure we give Workday the best data possible, we’ve removed more than 109,000 duplicate or inactive vendor records from the vendor file, reducing its size by 91%. What started as 120,000 vendor entries is now down to only 11,000 active vendor entries.
Data conversion
Now we’re in the process of converting data: translating it into something Workday can use. This is the WSU data you see during the Prototype Preview demonstrations. Testing the prototypes (now and during the Test stage this winter) helps us ensure the right data shows up in the right places in Workday and at the right point in each business process.
When cleanup and conversion efforts are complete, Workday will have solid data to run processes, generate reports, and help us be more effective in our day-to-day work.