Workday Success Stories: Grants subrecipient monitoring enhancements saving time for SPS

As part of Modernization’s ongoing efforts to improve grants management in Workday, we have launched a series of enhancements to subrecipient monitoring. These enhancements have resulted in significant time savings for Sponsored Programs Services (SPS), and help to support compliance with Federal Uniform Guidance requirements.

Prior to implementing these enhancements, SPS manually merged several reports to compile the necessary data to perform subaward reporting. To reduce this administrative burden, we’ve updated the report CR GRA Find Subawards, rearranging existing columns and adding 9 helpful new columns to align with SPS’s needs. Four new report prompts were also added to enable quicker return of the desired output.

In addition to these enhancements to the CR GRA Find Subawards report, Modernization also performed data cleanup for subaward contact information. During this process, over 600 contact records were consolidated and entered into Workday, eliminating the need for grants administrators to search for this information outside of our system of record. 

Since launching these enhancements, SPS has reported significant reduction in the time spent performing administrative tasks related to subaward reporting. One SPS staff member estimates saving 20-30 minutes for each of around 30 awards requiring reporting per month, or a total of 10 to 15 hours.

Modernization continues to work to develop solutions to improve grants management tasks in Workday. Visit the Grants News page on the Modernization website for more news and updates.

Questions? Reach out at the Workday Service Desk.

This article is part of our Workday Success Stories series. Since the launch of Workday in 2020, we’ve been keeping track of the ways our new system has changed how we work at WSU. Read more Success Stories here.