Are your Workday integrations taking longer than expected, overly complex, or failing too often? Have you ever found yourself frustrated by seemingly simple integrations that turn to major headaches? You’re not alone. We all know integrations are critical for ensuring accurate data flow between essential systems like HR, payroll and benefits – so when they go wrong, the consequences can be significant.
In fact, according to Strada’s survey data from Workday Rising, almost a quarter of respondents (22%) have consistently named integrations as their biggest Workday challenge for the past three years, putting it at the number one spot for both 2023 and 2024.
Our recent report, Bridging the Gap: From Good to Great in Payroll, cites poor integration as one of the major obstacles preventing businesses from getting the most value out of their payroll systems. It can cause fragmentation, undermine data accuracy, reduce transparency, and make it much harder to incorporate AI and automation.
If integration complexity or failures have been holding your organisation back, let 2025 be the year you overcome them. Fortunately, Strada, specialises in optimising integrations, especially those critical to your payroll process.
Common reasons integrations fail
While integrations are often critical to business processes and events, it’s not uncommon for them to fail. Several factors can cause integrations to break down – here are five common reasons why:
- Unexpected system outages: Integrations rely on continuous connectivity between systems, and unplanned outages can cause them to fail abruptly. Without proper monitoring or recovery mechanisms, these interruptions can result in significant delays.
- Expiring certificates: Authentication certificates used to secure integrations often expire without warning, breaking the connection between systems. If not renewed in time, these expirations can completely halt data transfers.
- Poor quality testing: Skipping thorough testing means critical issues, such as edge cases and scalability problems, often go unnoticed. When these flaws surface in production, they can disrupt essential workflows.
- Data quality issues: Incomplete, inaccurate, or inconsistent data can lead to failed processes or unreliable outcomes in integrated systems. Without proactive data cleansing and validation, these issues can snowball into larger operational challenges.
- Changing requirements: Business needs, system updates, or compliance changes can make existing integrations outdated or incompatible. Failing to adapt promptly can lead to breakdowns and inefficiencies.
How to optimise your Workday integration
Having a clear integration strategy is essential for ensuring your Workday integrations run smoothly and efficiently. Without a well-defined approach, integrations can become complex, prone to errors, and difficult to manage. Here are three tips to consider to optimise your approach Workday integrations:
- Plan and leverage Workday tools: Define clear integration goals and utilise Workday’s built-in tools like EIB, Studio, and Cloud Connect to streamline the process.
- Ensure data quality and thorough testing: Regularly audit data for accuracy and test integrations regularly with business and process updates.
- Implement ongoing maintenance: Consider your long-term strategy to update and maintain integrations and consider enlisting dedicated support.
How can Strada help with Workday integration optimisation?
Having been a Workday partner for over 16 years, Strada has built well over 10,000 integrations and we’ve mostly seen it all. From our library of over 800 pre-built integrations to our Workday Integration Optimisation solution, we’ve got you covered.
With Workday Integration Optimisation, Strada’s teams of experts bring their years of experience to helping businesses improve their integrations through targeted performance tuning. Our Integration Assessment Framework tracks performance across four key categories:
- Processing time: Detects bottlenecks from long running integrations and optimises before they cause performance issues or failures.
- Process Status: Identifies which integrations experience the highest failures and errors so that the root cause can be identified and fixed.
- Schedule Ownership: Recognises integrations running under personal accounts and migrate to Integration System Users (ISU) to improve security and prevent future failures.
- Schedule Timing: Identifies and fixes scheduling bottlenecks to prevent performance issues and potential failures.
How Workday Integration Optimisation benefits your organisation
Our teams perform diagnostics, reviewing your current integrations to identify both existing inefficiencies and potential areas of concern. Once opportunities for improvement have been identified, we provide actionable insights based on our findings, offering solutions to existing challenges and recommendations for preventing future issues.
We’ll help you to streamline and improve your processes, while also enabling your teams to be proactive in identifying and fixing potential integration problems.
Key features include:
- Identification and acceleration of long running integrations.
- Insights into the trends underlying current failures and errors to help avoid future issues.
- Integrations run by Integration System Users (ISUs) rather than employees or contractors, to avoid failures when security profiles change.
We’ve successfully reduced run times by up to 50% for 50+ clients so far.
Optimising Workday integrations is key to ensuring smooth, efficient operations across your organisation. While challenges are inevitable, taking a proactive approach will help you stay ahead of issues and position your organisation for success in 2025 and beyond. Now is the time to address integration pain points and set your systems up for long-term success. Let Strada help you save time and reduce the hassle with faster, more reliable integrations.
