Workday: A Blessing Or A Curse?

By Adam West
Late last semester, Centre College moved away from their old Jenzabar system for student worker information to Workday. Centre had been using Jenzabar since the 1990s, and had been looking for a new system since at least 2007. All of the systems Centre looked at would have cost a lot of money, but they ended up finding Workday as a system that fit in their price range, as well as an overall trend of moving to using Workday at the college level.
Workday was first implemented on the student side late last year, but Centre had been experimenting with it the year before. Currently, Workday is being used by student workers so they can log their hours by clocking in and out or by entering their time directly.
However, this transition has been anything but smooth. Many student pay checks have been late, adding new workers has been a hassle, and student worker promotions have not gone through.
To add onto the chaos, the finance office lost three of its employees during this transitional period, two from the Finance and HR office and one from Financial Aid, Laura Keown, putting even more stress on everyone than originally expected. The Finance and HR offices were more involved in the first part of the integration, while the Financial Aid office oversaw the transition on the student side. After Keown retired this summer, the financial aid office only had four people, with one of them being part time, to work on the transition. To quote Meredith Bruner, chief HR officer, the transition is “going to be like changing from the Flintstones to the Jetsons,” due to how old the Jenzabar technology was.
Centre plans on transitioning the entire Centrenet system to Workday instead of through several different apps. Behind the scenes, Centre has been using a variety of different plugins for Centrenet in order to keep things running smoothly, and Workday gives the college an opportunity to run everything through one system instead of a million. It’s a chore to have to jump through hoops with all of the apps on Centrenet, and a consolidation sounds promising.
Unfortunately, this replacement of Centrenet won’t go into effect any time soon. Although Centre has been moving away from Centrenet, it started with things like employee contracts and health insurance policies before the students began to notice much of a change. Employee integration started over thirteen months ago, and then the student experience with Workday started near the end of last semester.
There were three Workday integration steps planned: the first has already happened, with employee contracts. We are now experiencing the second, where the students are starting to see changes, which have been frustrating to say the least. The final will be a replacement of Centrenet. The entire process has been chaotic, however there is a light at the end of the Workday tunnel.