Month: June 2025

This past spring, nearly 100 Campus User Group members participated in a User Story Workshop. User stories are brief descriptions of how individuals in various roles use administrative systems and what outcomes they need. For example:

• As an employee, I want to change my benefits so I can add my newborn child to coverage, update my beneficiaries and make other changes.
• As a faculty member, I need to approve purchases against startup projects to ensure sufficient budget is available.

All Campus User Group members were invited to contribute user stories throughout the spring. More than 1600 stories were submitted. These stories will play a critical role in testing the Workday system and shaping training materials to ensure they reflect real user needs. As we approach the testing phase of the implementation we are committed to ensuring that Workday works not only for centralized offices, but also throughout the institution and related organizations, these User Stories will help us accomplish this goal.

In the spring/summer of 2024 Workday was selected as Clemson University’s new Enterprise Resource Planning system. A lot has happened behind the scenes since then. Our new blog will hopefully provide you with better clarity on how the move to Workday will impact you.  As we launch this blog, we want to look back at the activities and accomplishments thus far.

Many activities to prepare for the ERP implementation began in 2023. Clemson University stakeholders were brought together to discuss pain points with the current finance and human resources systems as well as identify “wish list” items. These wish list items were then synthesized to form our program priorities, as well set a level of preparation and readiness for the start of the design stage of the project. In the fall of 2024, the implementation began as Clemson partnered with Deloitte. The Plan Stage featured the design of the Foundation Data Model (FDM). The FDM serves as the core data model for both Human Resources and Finance in Workday. In addition, in the early part of fall 2024, the program hosted Discovery Sessions to build on the previous work done by Grant Thornton including business process mapping, and the previously mentioned pain point and “wish list” collection.  The objective of the sessions was to ensure a shared understanding of Clemson’s current administrative processes. During these sessions Deloitte met with over 250 faculty and staff across 19 Human Resources and Finance functional areas, gathering insights to guide system configuration. More than 49 sessions were conducted and over 300 discovery items were logged, laying a strong foundation for the Workday implementation.

The Architect and Configure or Design stage of the implementation began in the fall of 2024. Design sessions began in November of 2024 and continued through March of 2025. These sessions brought together Clemson Human Resources and Finance leaders, and a variety of university stakeholders, including related organizations, to make key decisions about streamlining processes. Design sessions were focused on transforming and aligning Clemson’s current state processes to Workday’s capabilities and Clemson’s program priorities to achieve the desired future state.  Stay tuned for continued updates as we begin to close out this current stage of the implementation and move on to the Test stage.

As we progress, we are committed to staying true to our guiding principles and increasing the cadence of information and inclusion of the Clemson University community.  As always, we encourage your questions and feedback via our Workday@Clemson.edu email inbox.