Workday Discovery Boards
Discovery Boards are Workday's answer to a modern, intuitive way of building reports. It enables ad hoc analysis on Workday Data Sources and is the future of report creation in Workday.
This quick guide will give an overview of setting up Discovery Boards (DBs) in your tenant (which now form part of your HCM or Financials subscription) and how to unlock an easier and quicker way to create reports in Workday.
The below information is from a GMS tenant using Logan McNeil as the user.
Domain Setup
Discovery Boards sit under Drive within Workday, so in order to access them you will first need to setup Drive in your tenant. If you need help setting up Drive, you can reach out to us at info@3plusconsulting.co.uk
The following 3 domains exist and they sit under the System Functional area (changed from the Prism Analytics functional area in 2020R2 to enable for all Workday customers)
You will need view and modify access to the ‘Discovery Boards: Create’ domain in order to create a DB in Drive. Generally, access is granted for Report Writer but can be done for other user-based groups depending on requirements and how your organisation self-serves reports.
A more admin related role, again depending on your security configuration, can be used for the ‘Discovery Boards:Administration’ domain. We’d advise a new user-based role to be created and assigned here as per best practice.
If you require further info on security group and domain setup contact info@3plusconsulting.co.uk and we can review your Workday security configuration in order to best support this decision.
Once this has been applied and you have activated pending security policy changes in your tenant, you will have access to Discovery Boards in Workday.
Discovery Board Setup
Go into ‘Drive’ either by searching or clicking on your profile icon. You can also add this to your home page:
In the top left-hand corner click ‘Add New’ and you will see Discovery Board in the drop down.
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This will prompt you for a name for the Discovery Board:
Once you have created a Discovery Board, you will hit the main landing page. This is where you create Visualizations, or Viz’s that represent quick drag and drop builders for reports.
Until 2020R2 the only Data sources that could be used were Prism Analytics Data Sources, but this has now been expanded to include a large array of Workday Transactional Data Sources:
Selecting the data source will take you to a ‘Data Source Filter’ and ‘Data Source Prompts’ page, should this apply to the data source you have selected:
Once selected you will be taken to the builder panel. This is where you can select an array of chart types that you wish to build.
Selecting a Donut Chart and a drag and drop of Employee Type as the data source in GMS produces the below almost instantly. This can also easily be exported as a standard matrix report as shown below.
A matrix report that might take 10mins to produce is now done in 10 seconds
We can also apply filters to the Sheet we are using or the Viz specifically. The filters function the same way as if we were using the filter tab on a custom report:
A second sheet can also be created for different types of Viz’s or data from different Data Sources. We can quickly flip from graph to chart and add a colour that represents Gender breakdown per Employee Type etc.
This can also be quickly adjusted between Area, Bar, line or Point to adjust the visual.
Reports can now be developed extremely quickly with clear visual representations of the data as opposed to the traditional build, test, build, test approach.
