AMS support: A year in the life

2020 was an extraordinary year, and with such an extreme year comes extreme data, making it hard for your organization to understand what your support needs might look like in the next 1-3 years as your team and your employees begin the transition into the new normal.

To help our customers see a more realistic view of what their support needs may look like in the future, and how Alight can help, we analyzed the data from our Application Management Services (AMS) customer requests from April 2019 to March 2020 to create an accurate snapshot of what our clients needed in terms of AMS support prior to the pandemic. Please note that the data sets included in this article are inclusive of Alight’s European Workday customer base only.

Thriving through the first year

Our analysis also found that 46 percent of the AMS tickets raised by customers during this time period were within 12 months of their go-live date, spanning the various Workday modules. 

Top troubleshooting problems per topic 

Below are some of the top reasons our customers reached out to us between April 2019 and March 2020 for AMS support.

HCM

• Business process updates- enhancements, condition rule changes and notification changes; business process re-design
• Reporting- issues with report security and the creation of custom reports
• Security – access issues, roles, incorrect routing issues, custom security rules, security issues with Document Generation and unassigned tasks
• Integrations related request that required functional assistance
• Other - WD audit trialing, performance issues, WD mobile, workers council working sessions.

Absence/ time off

•  Incorrect Time Off Balances and/ or Accruals
• Hire and Termination proration logic on accruals
• Rounding rules on accruals
• Worker job changes (including proration of accruals and eligibility to time off plans)
• Understanding the management of Accrual overrides/adjustments and Accrual scheduling logic

Talent and Performance

• Performance review related configuration - changes to support the year’s performance management cycle, mass rescind needs, incorrect rating scales and changes to types of data for evaluation, including competencies, questions, changes to help text and label names, updating translations and review rules.
• Goals updates- incorrectly archived goals, inability to archive due to rules and archived goal errors due to manage goal rules.
• Talent-related security- issues around talent card and report security
• Talent Reporting- primarily talent card related issues
• Calibration- updating calibration fields on n-box, new rating scale updates and troubleshooting calibration issues with workers not plotting.

Compensation

• Compensation plan configuration- creating new plans, advising on frequencies, currencies, and edits.
• Business process help- validations, approval chains and routings.
• Compensation step issues and corrections - corrections of amounts, help with employee details requested an updating historical compensation step amount.
• Reporting - custom reports for compensation review process, updating calc fields, issues with report fields not returning correct compensation data.
• Custom compensation review statements (advanced compensation)- overview assistance with the current merit or bonus configuration
• Security (who can see certain compensation elements) - issues caused by reorgs
• Compensation plan assignments - setting up compensation plans, issues around the plan configuration and plan assignments themselves.

Payroll

• Absence in relation to pay- holiday pay, maternity pay sickness pay
• Earnings and deductions- issues with existing earnings and deductions and the creation of new earnings and deductions.
• Other – pension related issues, tax calculations, issues while running payroll, pay slips, retro changes and pay group issues.

Finance

• Expenses – settlement issues, VAT changes following tax authority changes, business process changes, credit card provider changes
• Reports – invoice layout changes, changes following internal re-organization
• Accounting – GL account changes, spend / revenue category changes
• Integrations – adding integrations for new bank accounts, change to credit card provider
• Security – changes required following a Sarbanes Oxley audit
• General – major changes following company acquisition

Recruiting

• Agency management- business process and security setup
• Business process updates- candidate flow updates
• Custom notifications- help setting up notifications localized to regions
• Offer letters- signature changes
• Recruiting system health checks- reviewing complex configuration for optimization

Benefits

• Benefits election issues or enhancements- usually requiring a change in enrollment event rule configuration or a data load to correct elections
• Business process updates- One-third of requests related to the New Hire BP
• Benefit rate updates- updating rates and benefit data load support
• Passive events (events not triggering or being picked up by the wrong population)
• Open enrollment requests around U.S. Benefit elections

Learning

• Deployment related – go live support, workshops, estimates for divestitures
• Campaign - campaign related tickets usually for clients just gone live with Learning
• Learning configuration changes - error or issue in tenant that client cannot solve themselves, related mostly to security
• New release – retired release items, SCR account related tickets
• Known WD issues - well known Workday issue (need enhancement but not on the roadmap), brainstorms available
• Technical issues - SCORM package issue, issues with media files not running properly, help with editing video's such as adding multiple choice questions

Integrations

• Payroll – new third party payroll integrations, adjustment to existing payroll integrations (e.g. new paygroup used in WD added to integration), defects related to people missing in the integration, enhancement to the depth of detail being transferred
• Active directory – new single sign-on integrations, changes arising due to internal system updates, troubleshooting and resolution of unique issues with SSO
• Clarification process – post go-live knowledge transfer of integration processes,
• Building new interfaces – interfaces related Learning, Recruitment, Benefits and many others
• Consultation for self-build – assistance and guidance with self-developed integrations.