Automic Automation Cloud Integration: Workday

Streamline your enterprise resource planning and human capital management by orchestrating Workday processes directly within Automic Automation. Watch this video overview and step-by-step demonstration to learn how to deploy agents, configure connection objects, and automate background jobs effortlessly across environments.

Video transcript

Introduction to the Workday integration

Welcome to this video on the Automic Automation Workday integration solution. In this video, we will explain the Workday integration and what it brings to the Automic Automation user community.

Workday is a cloud-based enterprise management suite designed for enterprise resource planning, ERP, human capital management, HCM, financial management and analytics. It enables organizations to streamline operations, manage personnel, handle financial reporting, and gain actionable insights across enterprise functions.

Integrating Automic Automation with Workday allows you to run Workday jobs and orchestrate business processes directly from Automic Automation. We will provide some technical insights so that you can clearly identify the integration components and understand the deployment sequence. We will focus on the configuration of the agent and the design of the two core object templates connections and jobs. Finally, we will run through a demo.

The role of Automic Automation in orchestration

Automic Automation plays a central role in orchestrating operations across multiple environments including the cloud. Automic Automation synchronizes these processes with other non-cloud operations. By integrating Workday, we can configure process automation centrally in Automic Automation and then trigger, monitor and supervise everything in one place.

Workday processes can then be synchronized with all other environments routinely supported by Automic Automation. Workday's role is reduced to executing the jobs. All other functions, especially those about automation, are delegated to Automic Automation. This means that we do not have to log in to the Workday environment and manually refresh it. Automic Automation manages all the execution and monitoring aspects.

The Automic Automation integration provides a simplified view to run jobs in Workday. Automic Automation lets us build configurations with intuitive interfaces like drag and drop workflows and supervised processes in simple dashboard tools designed natively for operations. Statuses are color-coded and retrieving logs is done with a basic right-click. From an operations perspective, Automic Automation highly simplifies the configuration and orchestration of Workday jobs. Externalizing operations to a tool with a high degree of third-party integration means we can synchronize all cloud and non-cloud workloads using various agents and job object types. We can build sophisticated configurations. These can involve:

• Multiple applications

• Database packages

• System processes like backups and data consolidation

• File transfers

• Web services and other on-premises workloads

• Integration architecture and object templates

A conventional architecture involves two systems. The Automic Automation host and a dedicated system for the agent. The agent is configured with a simple INI file containing standard values. System agent name connection and TLS. When we start the agent, it connects to the engine and it adds two new objects to the repository:

• A connection object to store the Workday endpoint and login data.

• A job template designed to trigger Workday jobs.

Let's assume we're automating for four instances of Workday. We create a connection object in Automic Automation for each instance by duplicating the con template for each of these instances. Lastly, we create a Workday job in Automic Automation for each corresponding process in Workday.

The Automic Automation jobs include the connection object based on the target system. When we execute the jobs in Automic Automation, it triggers the corresponding process in Workday. We're able to retrieve the successive statuses, supervise the child processes in the cloud, and finally generate a job report. In Automic Automation, these jobs can be incorporated in workflows and integrated with other non-cloud processes.

Deployment and agent configuration

The installation process

The procedure to deploy the Workday integration is as follows.

• First, we download the integration package from the support portal. This package contains all the necessary elements.

• We unzip this package which produces a directory containing the agent, the INI configuration files and several other items like the start command.

• We use the appropriate INI file for our specific platform.

Mandatory INI configurations

Workday is a standard Automic agent. It requires at least four values to be updated:

• First, the agent name.

• Second, the Automic system.

• Third, the JCP connection and TLS port.

• And finally the TLS certificate.

When the agent is configured, we start it. New object templates are deployed. We create a connection to every Workday instance we need to support. For this, we use the template con object which we duplicate as many times as we need. The con object references the Workday endpoint. Finally, we use the Workday template job to create the jobs we need. We match these Automic Automation jobs to the Workday jobs, reference the connection object, and run them. We're able to supervise the jobs and their children, generate logs, and retrieve the statuses. The jobs can then be incorporated into non-cloud workflows.

We install, configure and start an agent to deploy the Workday integration.

• The agent is included in the Workday package which we download from the support portal.

• We unzip the package which creates a file system agents Workday bin directory that contains the agent files.

• Based on the platform, we rename the ucxjcitx.ini agent configuration file and set a minimum of four values:

  • The agent name.

  • The automation engine AE system name.

  • The host name and port connection to the automation engine's JCP.

  • And finally the directory containing the TLS certificate.

Finally, we start the agent by invoking the JAR file via the Java command. The agent connects to the AE and deploys the object templates needed to support the integration, the con or connection object and the Workday job.

Demonstration: Creating connections and jobs

In this demo, we will first create a connection object to your Workday environment. Then we will focus on demonstrating how to create, execute and supervise jobs. In this demo, we will show the launch integration job type which you can use to launch and import processes across human capital management, financials, and enterprise reporting. Let's start the demo.

First, log in to the Workday console. In the Workday UI, your business integrations and scheduled tasks are the heartbeat. This dashboard shows you exactly which integration events are running and which are completed. But manually launching every background process isn't efficient. That's where Automic Automation comes in. Instead of manual intervention, Automic uses launch integration jobs to trigger these processes automatically. You can ensure your environment runs smoothly by executing integrations on a precise schedule. Automic handles the heavy lifting from initiating the integration to verifying execution completion. You'll see the success reflected right here in your event history providing a clear audit trail for every automated execution Workday power Automic control.

Let's move on to the Automic system. Here we create connection and job objects with specific inputs that allow us to connect to Workday.

Configuring the connection object

If we open a connection object, we must enter the most important field, the base URL. It is the main URL that identifies the Workday environment. Next, we define the login credentials required to authenticate on the target system:

• In the username field, enter the user with privileges to access the Workday environment.

• Then enter the corresponding password for that Workday user.

• If the Workday system is behind a proxy server, you can define the parameters relevant to the connection in the proxy section. Here you can specify the proxy host name and the proxy port used by your proxy server.

• If your proxy requires authentication, enter the proxy username and proxy password.

Once the connection object is configured and saved, developers and object designers can select it when defining Workday jobs.

Setting up a launch integration job

Now we can create a Workday launch integration job. With this job, you can initiate and monitor Workday integration processes automatically. Here we start by opening the attributes page and make sure we select the agent that corresponds to the agent name you configured in the INI file. Now we go back to the launch integration job page.

• In connection, we select the Workday connection object we have just created. It holds the necessary information to connect to the target Workday application. To search for a connection object, start typing its name to limit the list of matching objects.

• Next, we configure the primary job identifiers. Enter the integration system ID. This ID identifies the Workday project, helping to organize and manage your Workday resources by associating them with a particular project within your cloud environment. You can also search for an ID by typing its name in the field to limit the results.

• In the descriptor field, enter the human readable display string, such as an employes name or department title for the referenced Workday object.

• Finally, you can optionally define the sleep interval in seconds as well as the failure interval in seconds.

Once all the parameters are set, we save and execute the job.

Monitoring and reporting

Let's switch to the executions view.

• The details pane shows the remote status field which tracks the job status in the target environment. In our case, the job started and ended. Okay.

• Here in the details tab, you can also view the populated object variables returned by the execution. Specifically, you see the run ID variable set to 10005148 along with the Workday final status variable which captures the final completion state directly from Workday for downstream processing within your workflow.

Let's have a look at the reports.

• The first report contains the information that the target system sends to Automic Automation when the job has been executed.

• The next log type is the agent log which shows all the agents actions step by step. It lists all the parameters used to run the job and contains the response received from the target system.

Now let's switch back to the Workday console to confirm the execution status. Here you see the run ID variable 10005148 and that the job has completed successfully. This concludes the demo on how Automic Automation can integrate with Workday to run, execute and monitor jobs. Thank you for watching this video.

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