About the Integrated Service Center
What is the Integrated Service Center (ISC)?
On June 27, 2017, the University of Washington replaced our 35-year old, decentralized legacy payroll system and many of its shadow systems with Workday, a modern, integrated, cloud-based software designed to standardize human resources and payroll processes. The launch of Workday, at the time the largest administrative effort in the University’s history, impacted over 45,000 employees working across three campuses, the Medical Centers and off-site facilities.
To facilitate the transition to Workday, the Integrated Service Center (ISC) opened their doors to provide Workday transactional support for faculty, staff, and students. The ISC comprises several teams ranging from generalists to specialists, with the common goal of providing enhanced customer support and optimizing Workday operations. The ISC is supported by many collaborative partners, including UWHR, UW-IT, Academic Personnel and other central business units, and we work closely with those partners, as well as with campus leadership, departments, and administrators, to improve human resource and payroll processes, reduce duplicated efforts and increase efficiency, provide better data for decision making, and strengthen security and compliance.
With Workday, it’s easier than ever for employees themselves to access, update and monitor their own payroll and benefits information, and employees will continue to work closely with their departments for many Workday tasks. Most transactions will continue to be entered, reviewed, approved and managed by departments and their HR and payroll representatives – including job hires, salaries and compensation, leave of absence, end dates and more. But when more complex transactional issues occur during the payroll or benefits process, the ISC is here to support employees, administrators and departments to solve Workday problems and optimize Workday processes.
What is Workday?
Workday is the cloud-based system the University of Washington uses to centralize and standardize human resources and payroll processes across three campuses, the Medical Centers and other off-site facilities. Workday is a proven cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solution for human resource and financial management, utilized by multiple industries and agencies including financial services, healthcare, energy, government, non-profit, hospitality, K-12 education, and higher education, and has been successfully deployed at other universities such as Arizona State University, Cornell, Louisiana State University, Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale and many more.
Workday’s numerous benefits include:
- An easy-to-use interface, available 24/7, that works on both Macs and PCs
- Online benefits enrollment
- Up to three direct deposit options, as well as enrollment in direct deposit at any time
- Real-time access for administrators and managers to human resources and payroll information
- Reduced paperwork, manual entry, duplicate data entry, and data entry errors
- Increased transparency and accountability through auditable business process workflows
- Consistent implementation of the latest technological upgrades across the entire UW’s HR and payroll system
Workday Releases
Workday releases platform improvements and feature upgrades designed to increase functionality and enhance the user experience twice a year, in September and March. These releases ensure UW stays up-to-date with technology changes, regulatory requirements, and our ever-expanding information needs.
Data Integrity
The ISC maintains the integrity of data in Workday in an ongoing effort to help identify and correct errors in employee records. The ISC regularly assesses opportunities for data review, and projects are prioritized according to payroll and/or benefits impact, possible negative downstream consequences, and number of people impacted. Visit the Workday Data Integrity page for additional information.
Visit the Workday HRP & Finance Cost Allocation Recharge page for information on how the University of Washington distributes the costs of implementing Workday.
Learning How to Use Workday
Many tasks in Workday can be handled by employees or departments independently of the ISC. The ISC website provides:
- A comprehensive User Guide library searchable by topic, security role and keyword.
- E-Learning training resources for employees and Workday security role holders. Visit the Workday Training page for details.
- Several other self-service support resources, including Quick Guides, simplified versions of User Guides for select Workday processes.
ISC Teams
The ISC has several talented and hard-working teams ready to step in, assist and support faculty, staff and administrators with Workday transactions.
Employee Workday Support Team
The Employee Workday Support (EWS) team provides support for all payroll, time, absence, and compensation issues that come into the ISC via contact forms, emails, phone calls or chat sessions. EWS team members have broad knowledge about many common issues that impact employees. (Workday Administrators, please note: you should first be working with your Named Support Contacts before contacting the ISC EWS team) EWS is the first point of contact for the majority of inquiries that come into the ISC. The team triages each inquiry, collects any additional information needed, and analyzes issues in order to either resolve the issue or, if they don’t have the answer, route tickets to the proper support team.
HCM Operations Team
The HCM Operations team (also sometimes referred to as HCM Service Partners) primarily works with departments and units to provide transactional support for organizations’ administrative activities in Workday, such as position events, hires, job changes, compensation changes, one-time payments, period activity pay and more. Working with the Named Support Contacts, HCM Operations is aligned with organizations within the UW in order to build effective partnerships, consult on Workday processes and transactions, and provide tailored support to meet the unique needs of our diverse campus.
Medical Centers staff work with the WMS team for HCM-type transactions.
Payroll
Ensuring that every UW employee receives an accurate paycheck on time is the ISC’s top priority. The Payroll Team processes around 45,000 paychecks each pay period! When issues surrounding payroll transactions are noticed, employees or departments – in partnership with Named Support Contacts and/or the ISC – investigate the underlying issue; when the problem has been successfully resolved, and if requested, the Payroll Team can complete an off-cycle payment. In addition, the ISC Payroll Team works behind the scenes to handle all deductions, withholdings, and payroll accounting at the University.
Medical Centers Staff work with the Medical Centers Payroll Services Team for questions regarding time worked, absence and paycheck issues related to Kronos.
Campus Engagement
The Campus Engagement team provides Workday training to the UW community, and creates and maintains Workday how-to documentation, including User Guides, Quick Guides and other resources for employees and administrators, as well as the ISC itself. Campus Engagement has also launched eLearning training for employees who provide units or departments with Workday HR and payroll support.
Application Management
The Application Management Team is responsible for Workday configuration, security administration, integration administration, report development and maintenance, and support of regular Workday updates. Complex transactional issues in Workday may be escalated to this team for investigation and resolution.
You can reach the Executive Director of the ISC by emailing ExecDirISC@uw.edu.