BNB Staff writersBNB Staff writers 
November 4th, 2019 Workday Cloud platform allows you to create solid applications and extensions ad hoc to your own way of doing business with all the services that are used to create Workday applications.
Today, Workday provides apps for: human resources, financial, student, and payroll business areas. These are Workday core apps into one platform. Workday Cloud Platform was envisioned to allow developers to bring these core apps to the next level, not only by developing extensions for those, but also by creating their own custom applications. Eventually, the platform will have a marketplace, where developers can sell their custom-created apps.
How does Workday Cloud platform work?
Workday Cloud Platform provides REST web services, or APIs. There are APIs for each one of the core apps like Workday HCM and Workday Financial Management, that allow you to read and update data. This is what you see in the upper-right quadrant of the following image.
Workday Cloud Platform developers will use the same technology and platform services as Workday developers.
Using Workday Cloud Platform allows to:
- Read/write core Workday data, including human resources, financials, student, and payroll data.
- Build apps with Workday look-and-feel.
- Build external apps using tools and frameworks of your choice.
- Use delivered services like core services, data and analytics services, conversation services, among others.
- Create apps using Workday organizational and security models.
- Build apps that are “safely updated”.
What did BNB build on Workday Cloud Platform?
We have participated in WCP Test Drive, a Workday program that allows pre-selected clients to have the opportunity to evaluate, explore and understand what can be built with Workday Cloud Platform.
We invited our developers to explore how we can boost employee engagement inside BNB.
We discovered that employees were having different experiences across recognition and rewarding, so we wanted to take a special look to employees’ engagement.
We built our own application, BNB Space, and tested it along 3 weeks. This application allowed our employees to obtain points through the achievement of certain challenges that arised within BNB.
How did this app work?
Every time that an employee did something remarkable for the company and/or for her/his colleagues, the app rewarded that employee with coins that could be exchanged for a prize within a list of rewards.
Challenges:
- As early adopters, this was our first app! We didn’t have previous knowledge or information about how to do it.
- In fact, the biggest challenge we faced was to build a business process through the reward program. Each coin was given to the employee every time that he/she did something remarkable or something that was part of his/her challenges. This reward had to be approved by the manager.
Results:
- Workday created Workday Cloud platform community where you can be in touch with several developers. At the same time, you can have access to videos and manuals about other existing apps that can help you with your own app.
- We used our own cloud data
- We managed our own application life cycle: we designed our data model through to deploying BNB Space application
- BNB Space application behaves just like any other Workday application moreover it was used in the Workday user experience
Employees could use these points to get different gifts.
We also created some reports to have a quick access to this new information in the system:
We definitely took advantage of Workday platform capabilities: we created our own Data Model, we wrote our own business logic, and we created layouts and forms using Workday tenant configurations.
Workday Cloud Platform enables your own applications to perfectly fit with Workday transactions and not worry about infrastructure. Actually, you can play with Workday and all capabilities available in the platform while still being Workday!
At the same time, you can create and share your own knowledge with others through community so new functionalities created by your developers can work for other companies and vice versa. Wonderful isn’t?
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