Penn Community Workday Transition

Penn Community, an offering under Identity Management Services, provides biographic, demographic and affiliation information about people who are part of the University community.

As of July 1, 2019, Workday is the source of University employee data in Penn Community (note that Health System employee data comes from a separate source not impacted by this initiative).

The Human Capital Management (HCM) project to migrate to Workday has its own Workday web site with more information.

Overview

Workday requires changes in how we think about the structure of employee data.

Some of these changes are outlined in a presentation given June 4, 2019, at Penn's IT Staff convention. Note that there have been various versions of this presentation which have changed over time, and that some of this information is already out of date. It still gives a good idea of the type of changes in general. Many of these changes are already documented in the "Tables and Elements" pages connected to the Penn Community web site. Campus constituents with specific use cases should contact us for current information.

Deployment timeline

The Penn Community changes will go into effect over a 2-week period starting June 21 and going through July 1, with a few changes coming later in the first week of July. A rough idea of how this is playing out can be found in a timeline dated June 13. As with the presentation above, some of this information may be out of date. This timeline is flexible in that it will respond, as needed, to the timeline of the overall HCM project. Use this as a rough guideline but not a firm schedule.

FAQ

On the related FAQ we're trying to post the questions we've been receiving. Questions and answers may change over the next weeks. 

Contacting us

Please use the Penn Community Request found in the Support Center, and make sure you include "Workday" in your request title. If you don't have access in the Support Center, please email Client Care and reference "Workday Penn Community question" in your subject line.

Transition

Will there be downtime?
No; we do ask data consumers to hold large or resource-intensive queries during two time periods, if they are able to do so without harm to daily operations:
•    Saturday, June 22, 4am through 5pm (estimated)
•    Monday, June 24, 12:01am until afternoon/evening notice to resume
When will Penn Community start changing as a result of the Workday project?
Underlying database changes went into production June 4, 2019. Changes to the application codebase will be deployed June 22, 2019. Penn Community will stop receiving data from the legacy HR environment after the data load on the evening of June 21, and will begin receiving data from Workday on June 24, 2019, in advance of the Workday July 1 go-live.
When will Workday data begin to appear in Penn Community?
The current deployment schedule calls for Penn Community to start receiving Workday data sometime on June 24. Some records might not appear until June 29-30.

EntryView

How will EntryView change?
Several ways:
•    New fields will be displayed
•    Some affiliations will no longer be available for web-entry
Will new affiliations be available to assign through EntryView?
No.
Will affiliations be removed from EntryView?
Yes. These affiliations will no longer be available to assign through EntryView: ADJF, ERF, RTSF, SFAC, VFAC, VSCO, WFAC. ERF and RTSF were removed on June 21. The others will be removed June 30, 2019.
How will SERV, PGUE and CTSY affiliations be impacted?
Penn Community operators will be able to assign these affiliations as they do now. It is possible that an individual with one of these affiliations will be included in the Workday data, in which case they will also have a Workday-source affiliation, but the addition of the Workday-sourced affiliation should not affect the web-entered affiliation.
Will the affiliation source still be PENNPAY?
Yes.

Affiliations

What affiliations will be given to records coming from Workday?
Workday will be the source of six affiliations as follows:
•    FAC (Faculty)
•    STAF (Staff)
•    TEMP (Temporary Staff)
•    CTWK (Contingent Workers; a new affiliation)
•    ERF (Emeritus and Retired Faculty)
•    RTSF (Retired Staff
More information available in the ITSC presentation referenced on the "Workday Transition Documentation" tab.
So what are these Contingent Workers?
A Contingent Worker is a worker in a position in the supervisory organization structure who does not receive pay or benefits.Usually, contingent workers are people who must be in Workday because they supervise a Penn employee, but are not themselves a Penn employee. Examples include: Aramark or Bon Appetit supervisors, or UPHS employees who supervise university employees.
What’s the deal with ERF and RTSF?
ERF (Emeritus and Retired Faculty) and RTSF (Retired Staff) have existed as Penn Community affiliations for many years. Historically they were generally created manually in the PennCard center when the retiree took in a form to get a Retiree card. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they were also created around campus, sometimes incorrectly, for reasons unknown. Regardless of the source, until Workday came to campus, these were created manually through EntryView or bulk upload.

With Workday, Penn Community now receives data from Workday indicating who is retired, and from what job family they have retired. The rules in place July 1, 2019:

  • If the individual was FAC, then ERF: If the individual retired from a position in the “Academic” Job Family Group, they are given an ERF affiliation at the time the FAC affiliation goes inactive. 
  • IF STAF, then RTSF: If the individual retired from a position in the “Staff” or “Union” Job Family Groups, they are given an RTSF affiliation when the STAF affiliation goes inactive.
  • If a record post-Workday shows an inactive FAC or inactive STAF affiliation, this indicates a faculty member or staff member who left Penn, but did not retire from Penn. They are simply an inactive former employee.
Doesn’t ERF mean Emeritus Faculty?
No. ERF is the Penn Community affiliation used for any retired faculty member, regardless of whether they are eligible or not for Emeritus designation (see answer to question above). The Faculty Handbook describes the conferral of Emeritus status at the bottom of this page: https://catalog.upenn.edu/faculty-handbook/ii/ii-b/ and we are trying to adhere to this rule in any query we develop or assist with.
 
PennGroups has a group for all retired faculty (all active ERF affiliation) and has a group for Emeritus faculty (those that meet the conditions specified in the Faculty Handbook). If you are interested in pursuing a school-focused PennGroup for Emeritus faculty in your school, please drop us a ticket at the Support Center, https://supportcenter.upenn.edu, using the PennGroups request link.
Can I change someone from RTSF to ERF?
No. Except for EntryView-created affiliations, Penn Community affiliations are rule-based. The only way an affiliation would change would be if the source data would change in such a way that Penn Community logic would recalculate the affiliation.
What is an Affiliate?
An Academic Affiliate is someone who is engaged at the University in an academic capacity, with an academic appointment, but is not employeed by the university in a paid capacity. Common examples are Adjunct Professor or Visiting Professor or Visiting Scholar. These individuals are entered in Workday so that their academic appointment is recorded, but they are a different type of record in Worday. In Penn Community EntryView, they have a "Y" value in the Affiliate Flag: field. These individuals will have a FAC affiliation, and can be distinguished from paid faculty by the Affiliate Flag data point.

Data changes

What data changes?
The Tables and Data Elements tab on the Penn Community Details page has been updated to reflect changes in data due to Workday implementation.
How can I tell if data is sourced from Workday or Legacy HR?
EntryView will have a new data element, Workday ID (an 8-digit numer not to be confused with PennID). If that field is populated, the record comes from Workday. If that field is empty, the record is from legacy HR.
How is ORG changing?
The concept of 'home ORG' and corresponding data point 'Organization' in EntryView is being repaced by the Workday 'cost center.' While this is still a 4-digit value from ORG in Penn's chart of accounts, this value may change for certain individuals over the course of the transition to Workday. We'll try to post a link to the Workday glossary entry on this when it becomes available.
How is 'name' changing?
Workday holds both a legal name and a preferred name. If an individual has a preferred name, that is the name that will be available on the PENNPAY affiliation in EntryView, and available for query/web service response. If there is a business need for legal name, please contact us to discuss. There is no change to names on other affiliations.
Paid Flag says 'Y' incorrectly
Yes. You should not use this data element (or any Penn Community data) to determine the actual paid status of any person. We discovered very late in June that it would not be possible to issue PennCards to Workday-sourced people unless this value was 'Y'.

Directory

Why aren't all email addresses being fed back to Workday?
We discovered recently that Workday does not currently accommodate automatic update of Academic Affiliate contact data. If email addresses for this population must be kept up to date in Workday, the appropriate Academic Partner will need to make these updates manually in Workday. This issue has been reported to Workday.

PennCard

What about PennCards?
The PennCard office has its own FAQ to address PennCard-specific questions.

PennKey distribution

How will PennKey Setup codes be distributed?
For incoming employees, Setup code and instrutions will be sent to the personal email address on record in Workday. If there is no personal email address entered, this process will be stalled until the HR analyst responsible enters a personal email address.
But there is an email address in Workday . . . and the incoming employee isn't getting the email!
Experience tells us that occasionally HR analysts enter the email address in the "work" email field instead of the "personal" email field. The process will only use email addresses in the "personal" email field.
When does this happen?
Within a few minutes after the Workday "Hire" business process completes, Penn Community attemps to send the email. If all the data is available and correct, the incoming employee should receive their Setup code or PennKey reminder email within a few minutes of the completion of the Hire business process. If the email address is missing, the process will wait until an email address update takes place and the email address is sent to PCOM. Note that the Hire business process can happen weeks before someone is due to start work at Penn, on the day they show up, or even, unfortunately, after they are already here. Timing is completely dependent on when the HR Analyst or other Workday user completes the Hire business process in Workday.
What if the individual already has a PennKey?
Assuming we have the appropriate email address, they will receive email reminding them that they already have a PennKey and providing instructions on how to recover their PennKey if they have forgotten it.
Will the email process work for existing employees?
No, at this point in time, this process only works for incoming new employees. COVID-19 note: Client Care has a process for handling setup code distribution given remote work requirements. Contact help@isc.upenn.edu for additional support.

If you are interested in access to Penn Community, or if you have Penn Community documentation questions, please open a ticket in Support Center. A member of our team will be in touch with you.