RE: [ALCTS-acqnet] Acquisitions and Workday

We went live with Workday on July 1, 2018, and it has significantly impacted our workflow in Acquisitions. Some of these features will vary depending on your institution’s policies, but here are the ways that we use Workday in Acquisitions. Note that we’re currently on Millennium, which does not integrate even the slightest bit with Workday. All our financial transactions must also be entered in Millennium for our own records.

Invoices requiring a check payment are entered in Workday with an electronic copy of the invoice attached.
Credit card purchases are entered in Workday with a receipt attached.
Purchases over a certain threshold require pre-authorization, which is entered as a requisition in Workday.
Purchases over another threshold require a sole source justification, which is submitted through Workday.
Credit card purchases are reconciled in Workday.
Budget management is handled through Workday.
Travel expenses are handled through Workday.

All processes that are run through Workday must be approved in Workday by the appropriate people.

I will be upfront about the fact that it’s been a significant amount of work to make the transition. There’s a general consensus in the library that Acquisitions carries the brunt of the changes imposed by implementing Workday. Our staff have invested quite a few hours in workshops and individual training sessions, and we’ve met multiple times with people from Finance to go over how the changes work best with our procedures. We’ve mostly settled into the new routine now, with the occasional question or glitch needing to be addressed.

One issue we experienced was that our campus initially decided to integrate purchasing from our office supply contractor and from Amazon with Workday. They’re technically compatible, but there were a number of technical issues that ultimately resulted in discontinuing use of that feature, much to our relief. During the time that Amazon was integrated into Workday, we had to access Amazon through Workday (rather than directly), and every individual title had to be ordered as a single order and processed through the approval structure. It was extremely time-intensive and required multiple people to touch each transaction multiple times.

Probably the biggest challenge we faced was the approval structure for expenditures. In Workday, each department is called a “Cost Center” and is assigned a single Cost Center Manager. This manager is responsible for approving every single expenditure for that department. In our case, the library director was assigned as the cost center manager. She was immediately inundated with notifications that items needed her attention in Workday – because every single purchase in Acquisitions requires approval by the cost center manager. The vast majority of spending in the library came from the Acquisitions department, so we requested that I be set up as the cost center manager instead. This meant that all expense requests in the library came to me – including travel expenses, meal reimbursements, office supplies, etc. I had to forward any non-Acquisitions requests to the director for a second approval. This was cumbersome and confusing. We worked with Finance to brainstorm a solution, and we ended up setting up the library with two cost centers. One is for books/periodicals/electronic resources and one is for everything else. I’m the manager for the first and the director manages the second. This workflow is working well for us.

A couple of other changes we made to our workflows – because each purchase has to be run through Workday, and our ILS doesn’t communicate with Workday, we were spending significant time entering duplicate records. We decided to reduce the amount of work with our two largest vendors, Amazon and GOBI. With Amazon, we have a line of credit established, so we can purchase using the LOC and then pay the invoice once a month. Individual Amazon transactions are still entered in Millennium, but we only have to enter the monthly invoice in Workday. We also estimated the likely amount we’d spend with GOBI based on past years and established a deposit account. This allowed us to enter the deposit account invoice once in Workday, while we can still track all the individual purchases and invoices in Millennium.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Rebekah Ostini
Coordinator for Content Management

FURMAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
3300 Poinsett Highway | Greenville, SC  29613 | 864.294.2193 | rebekah.ostini_at_furman.edu<mailto:rebekah.ostini_at_furman.edu>




From: acqnet-request_at_lists.ala.org <acqnet-request_at_lists.ala.org> On Behalf Of Corbett, Lauren
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2019 4:49 PM
To: acqnet_at_lists.ala.org
Cc: Sathi, Katherine <ksathi_at_wustl.edu>
Subject: Re: [ALCTS-acqnet] Acquisitions and Workday

I'm also interested in answers to these questions since we are on our first fiscal year in Workday here and we are manually entering invoice data into Workday.  We have primarily EDI invoicing with Voyager.
Lauren
--
Lauren Corbett
Director of Resource Services, Z. Smith Reynolds Library
Wake Forest University
336-758-6136               ISNI: 0000 0003 5170 369X


On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 4:32 PM Sathi, Katherine <ksathi_at_wustl.edu<mailto:ksathi_at_wustl.edu>> wrote:
Hello collective wisdom –

Our campus will be rolling out Workday, beginning with the financial management module, in the next year or so.

Here at the Libraries we are discussing to what extent this new environment will impact our Acquisitions workflows, and I’m curious to hear from other libraries that are currently using Workday.

How have you altered workflows to accommodate Workday?  Is there any part of the Acquisitions process that takes place within Workday?  Invoicing is one example that comes to mind, are there others?

Thanks very much for any insight you can provide!

Kate

Kate Sathi
Collections Services Librarian
Washington University in St. Louis
ksathi_at_wustl.edu<mailto:ksathi_at_wustl.edu>