Name: Driving Innovation with Workday Extend: CliftonLarsonAllen Success Story
Uploaded: 2025-04-29T17:16:11.691Z
Duration: 56 min 12 s
Description: Driving Innovation with Workday Extend: CliftonLarsonAllen Success Story

Transcript for "Driving Innovation with Workday Extend: CliftonLarsonAllen Success Story": Hello, everyone. Thank you all for joining. We'll give it another thirty seconds. I see more folks trying to trickle in. Alright. Let's get started. Again, hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. Before we get started, just a few housekeeping items. All participants have been muted. For questions, please use the q and a feature that's gonna be located at the bottom of your screen. And this webinar is recorded, and will be distributed after our session today. And, also, a quick reminder, any decisions around work based services should be based off of feature and functionality that's available today as opposed to anything forward looking that we might be discussing during during today's session. But today's session is going to be all about Workday Extend, and Workday Extend was something that was introduced at Workday, in 02/2020 as a result of the feedback that we've received from our customers. Customers told us, that although Workday is really flexible, they had additional HR and finance processes specific to their organization that Workday didn't offer and most likely will never going to offer simply for the fact that they were really bespoke to that organization. And that's where Workday Extend comes in. Workday Extend fills that gap. It gives our customers the same toolset that our developers use at Workday to build their own custom applications on the platform. So for today's agenda, I'm going to be doing a quick overview of what Workday Extend is, and then we'll be reviewing a live app demo of how something looks with built with Workday Extend. And then we're gonna have a customer spotlight with, Clifton, Larsen, Allen, and they're gonna be sharing, their success with the platform and some of the use cases that they've built. And then at the end, we did leave some time for q and a. So if you do have questions, please use use the chat functionality, and the and the q and a functionality, with your questions. As for introductions, my name is Sam Shah. I'm a part of our center of excellence team here at Workday specializing in all things extent. And with me today, I am joined by Jason Hicks, who's a counterpart on my team. And then we have Aaron Gray, who's a VIP or P IT director. And then last but not least, we have Shail Goel, who's an enterprise architect at Workday. So Workday Extend started, in 02/2018 and it went GA in 2020, and it's a fairly mature product at this point. We have over 2,500 applications that are currently live in production. We have over 13,000 developers in our developer community and over 1,200 customers and 50 SI partners, that are responsible for building apps for our customers. So Workday Extend is very different when we compare it to anything else that we offer at Workday. As opposed to being an application, Workday Extend is a developer toolset that allows our customers to build applications that live natively inside of Workday. So when we think about an application, think about it as an experience. Right? The experience that you're building, leveraging Workday Extend is going to look and feel like any other experience that lives inside of Workday. You're able to capture new data using business objects and have it live in Workday. You can use Workday's security as well as audibility. In your apps, you can automate new business processes as well as connect to third party systems. And then you can also connect it to things like Prism or Journeys or any other application native legal constraint processes. And just just this last year, we also introduced a new offering under the Workday Extend umbrella called Workday Extend Professional. With Workday Extend Professional, we're providing our customers, in addition to just the great things that we've been providing our customers with Extend, also the the ability to build applications leveraging Workday's AI APIs as well as AWS AI services. In addition to that, with Extend Professional, we're also offering our customers the ability to leverage an AI companion to build those applications much faster. And then lastly, our customers with extend professional are also able to, build more complex applications with an increase in data capacity, and and data storage. Now that I talked a little bit about what extend is, and why it matters, I'm gonna pass it over to Shail so he can share an example of what an app looks like if you were to go to work to extend. Shail, take it away. Great. Thank you, Sam. So, like Sam said, I'm going to, show you an example of, an app built with extend in action. There are whole bunch of and the app I'm going to show you is from our app catalog. The whole bunch of these apps that are available in the catalog for our customers to download and use, either as a learning exercise, copy paste the code, or just as a starting point. So the one I'm going to show you is, this document intelligence app. The idea with this app is to utilize a Workday AI model around documents. So being, being ability to scan and infer relevant data out of the documents. And there are different type of parsers we have. There are only few that I have here highlighted in the app. By the way, what you're looking at is an extend app page. Right? So in this, from a demo purpose, we have, like, selection in terms of what do we want to scan. In this case, I can do, let's say, an image with a text. And it could be a, you know, employee badge, let's say this one, that has image, but it definitely has some text. So we can use this, AI gateway functionality and extend to extract and infer the text out of a document like this, image. Now in this case, it's a generic, parser, meaning it didn't necessarily know what that document type is. So all it does is it gives me the wall of text, but it's still it's able to, extract all the text out of that image. I can also use it for other type of documents. Let's say, if it's a receipt, and I have this receipt here, and you'll notice it's an expense receipt. Not everything is so clearly, when when the photo was taken, it wasn't really the best of the photo. So in many some of the information is clear, but not everything. But we are able to, in this case, use this receipt specific parser to have it scanned. Now it is a specific parser, so it know, what text means what. So rather than just giving me a wall of text, it will tell me, you know, what is the amount, what's the date or the merchant name and the currency and so on. We can also, use it and by the way, there are a whole bunch of different parcels we provide as part of this functionality, the document intelligence with AI gateway, like your passports, your driver licenses, resumes, the bunch of those. But I can also upload a word document. Let's say you have a candidate applying for a HR manager position. I can take that resume as well as have it compared against a job profile that's in your tenant. So it's actually not just looking at the text from, inferring the text out of it, but in this particular case, for resume parser, we are also doing a skill gap analysis. So it's going to infer the skills out of that resume as well as the skills out of that job profile, and then do the comparison of the skills between the two entities. So it, you know, obviously will extract some of the text. Like, for example, here you see the applicant name, their employment history. But more importantly or more interestingly, it's this skill gap analysis. Again, the the candidate may not have called out specific skills like a list of skills in his or her resume, but, this, AI gateway functionality or through the AI gateway functionality using the document intelligence, we are able to infer their skills and then do the comparison against the skills from job profiles. So it's telling me, you know, there are two skills that this candidate matches. There are 13 the candidate has extra that are not necessarily, required for the job, and then 11 that are missing. Now this is just a, you know, what's possible or out of the possible. Obviously, your use case might vary, but the idea is utilizing these AI capabilities in extent, you can start to build a more intelligent apps, without knowing or without having to build those AI models yourself. Now in terms of how you actually or, you know, what does it take to build apps like these? So I also want to, quickly highlight, one of the functionalities Sam, earlier mentioned around, the companion or developer copilot. By the way, this is the development environment of Extend. It's called developer.workday.com. US customer will have access to it, once you subscribe, to, extend. And by the way, this is where I mentioned the app catalog. This is the the repository of apps. There are 55. Excuse me. Sorry about that. There are 55 apps that are available in the catalog for, you know, you to start with. And what I want to show you is one of the app that I'm working on. And by the way, this is an environment where you learn about extend. You can interact with fellow developers. There's a development forum here, but this is also the environment where you'll actually be offering your apps. So the app offering experience is through this functionality within DevSight we call app builder. And what it is is on the left hand side you see is the structure of my app. It starts with having a security domain. By the way, many of these these things you see on the left hand side are what's referred as different components of what makes an app like Sam Shah was walk walking through. Right? So I have a security domain defined, and, yeah, as you can see, you can do it more declaratively. You don't necessarily have to write the code. And I also have a business object created here. The name of the business object is nomination, and then I have certain fields. And the idea with this business object is to capture, you know, employees to nominate, each other within an organization for, you know, an award or giving you feedback. Right? So I have fields like date, employee name, reason, why we are nominating, and the core value organization core value we are nominating for. You can also define relationships. So here, employee name field is, related to a Workday delivered object worker. And I'll show you how it helps and why you may want to do it. But then, I have an a page created. And by the way, to make it easy oops. Sorry. I should have logged in. To make it easy, what you do is you don't have to just sustain the development environment. You can side by side, look at, what the page as you're working on will look like once the app is deployed without actually having to deploy the app. So here is my page. You can see I can obviously make changes to the page. Again, not necessarily have to get down to the code level. That's why extend, you know, is more of your low code development environment. But this is the page. What I have on the page is a title with some text, and I have two cards with two buttons on one button on each card. Right? And that's what these two cards are. But now let's say I would like to build a page or create a page, where, the page that I can use to create a nomination. So this is where we can utilize our, generative AI based companion or our Copilot developer Copilot, which helps me go from text to code generation. So I can start to type what I want it to do. I can either type it here or I can actually use some of the the prepopulated prompts as well. Let's say I would like to generate a page that, creates a nomination. Right? And in this case, obviously, it's very context aware. It knows what that nomination really means. So I can write a prompt, and it will generate the content for me. I can also do things like well, let's look at the the generated page first. So what it's going to do, it's going to generate the code of that page where I can create nomination or give someone a nomination. And by the way, it's the code ultimately at the end, and behind the scene, but I can view. I can go to the view mode or the preview mode and see what that page actually looks like. So here it is. I didn't have to write a single line of code, and it created a page called create nomination, with the fields that we had on the business object, core value date, employee name, reset. I can, you know, do things like move the employee name field to the top of the page, right, and then generate. So, obviously, I can use just this text or natural language to describe what I want the page to look like, and I can generate the code and, all no. By the way, not just the code for that page, but everything that's needed to make that, application work. So in this case, if you recall employee field on that by the way, it moved now the employee name to the top. If you recall, the employee name was related to a Workday delivered business object. And since I'm logged into a tenant here, this is a fully functional page. So here, it's even has built a query, a graph query, call for me to retrieve the list of employees from my tenant. So, again, you know, it does a whole bunch of thing. It creates, like, these different type of artifacts. You can see different graph queries, some mock data for me to test this as well as the actual page. And if I'm happy, I can add all that to my app here. And by doing it, now you see I have a second page created. This is my second page, which is to create. And here, I can start to make other changes, let's say. The reason if I didn't want it to be a plain text and I would rather want it to be a rich text, I can make those kind of changes quickly here, and refresh to see what the page looks like. So in no time, here you are. Right? Now it becomes a a rich text box. So in no time, you are able to get going and create, most of your app component through this local, no code development environment. With that, let me pass it back on to, is it Sam or Jason, who's taking it? Jason, go ahead. It's a little staff. I appreciate it. Thank you, Shail Goel. I appreciate you kind of a muscle and through. It sounds like you're a little bit under the weather. And I would like to take this opportunity to kind of invite Aaron Gray who, part of CliftonLarsonAllen. He's gonna be our kind of spotlight today. So first, Aaron, I appreciate you, joining and kinda taking the time and really, actually sharing, kind of the great success that you've had, with Workday Extend. You've been a Workday customer for kind of several years now and kind of share on those spotlight apps. So first, Patrick, I I wanna let people know that that was an impressive live demo. I'm not brave enough for that. We're gonna have screenshots for what I'm sharing. Yeah. Great demonstration by by Shail Goel, and it's one where we've definitely seen a very high interest in developer Copilot. Just you think of the amount of time that it can kind of speed up from an app development. Many customers I've seen that have it had had at least a 50 efficiency, so they can both apps in half the time. They're gonna be, you know, twice as efficient as they previous previously were. So, definitely, it always seems to be the kind of backlog of extend apps, and that definitely helps kind of put a dent into those, of course. So, but but, Aaron, even though you're not doing a live demonstration, definitely great stories to share. I appreciate you kinda scaring some sharing some screenshots and things that are kind of specific and you kinda found valuable in the organization. But, first, I I'd like for you to take, some time to kind of, introduce yourself, kind of your background, and can you tell us, a little bit about CliftonLarsonAllen? Absolutely. Yeah. CLA is one of the top 10 accounting firms in the country. We're nationwide, 30 offices, 9,000 people. We focus on Main Street America and delivering not just, regulatory compliance like tax returns and audits and things like that, but also additional services that our clients are looking for like wealth advisory or digital outsourcing whether need help with payroll or bookkeeping, that kind of thing. So we're trying to be that, one stop shop for kinda the core of America, the main street of America, all across the country. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that, Aaron. So but let's kinda get right into it. You've been, like I mentioned before, an extended customer for for several years. You've you've subscribed to not only Workday HCM, but also Workday financials as well as kind of other functional areas. You've got a good portion of the Workday suite. But there's also a variety of different kind of platforms you could potentially build on. There's others, of course, out there in the market. Why did CLA decide to build and kind of subscribe to a purchase, extend and build on extend as opposed to other platforms that are in the market? Sure. Yeah. When we were, looking to go live with PSA specifically, we knew that we were going to want extend, and a lot of that comes from kind of expanding on the power of one, having all the information in one place. That was really important to us, but we also like the idea of building directly on Workday. You could see through that demo when you're looking at the pages, it looked like Workday. There there wasn't another place to go to to find those pages. It's in the global search. You can make applets. You can make it where it just appears to be part of Workday to your end users. And that was really what we were looking for. We we want something that is as seamless as possible, intuitive as possible. We don't have to do training on them that is just clicking around in the app that we built the same way they are when they're putting in their time or or making absence of entries, things like that. Yeah. That that's definitely one of the common things that we hear is for it's easy from an end user adoption standpoint because your users are already familiar with Workday. Right? You don't have to go and do a kind of a chair pivot to a different application, different screen, things like that. It's just kinda seamlessly woven in for from that experience standpoint. So, yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. So kind of that's why you chose, you know, Workday Extend. Let's let's get into what CLA has built on on Workday Extend, and kinda shift gears a little bit, talk about your Extend apps. So CLA has five apps in production today, but three of them you kind of mentioned were mission critical. Those are really gonna be kind of our focus for today's, for today's session. So I'd like to start with this kind of project rollover extend app as you call it. From what I understand, this was kind of the first extend app that you put in production. So if you could take a few minutes to talk about, really kind of the app itself, the functionality it provides, kind of what who uses it, from an end user standpoint at CLA, and then also what problem that it solves as well. Sure. Let's start with the last bit. So the in like, for accounting firms, when you use tax returns, we have an 80,000 tax returns we do a year, and they're annual. You know, ideally, most of the time, all the clients are coming back and just growing. So each tax return is a project, and there's also additional projects to go with it for consulting other services that we're doing with them. So in our environment, we have a million active projects right now. So we can't manually manage that volume. We need something that can make changes for us when we need to. So we use the term rollover in the accounting industry and think of that as I finished my 2023 tax return. Now I need a project to do my 2024 tax return. It's gonna be, you know, John Doe. We know that it's gonna be a ten forty tax return. We know a lot of the information that needs to go into that project, and we need to do a 80,000 of them at one time. So we built this app to basically do that where it would use logic that we've given it. Here's the things that are gonna be consistent from year to year. Here's the naming conventions that we have of the projects so that we can move them all forward in groups. And whether that group is based on service or geography, whatever, I guess, demographics we're using inside the system to identify the ones we want to create a new project. So that's what we call roll forward. It's used by our team that manages our projects. It's our central billing team. So they're working closely with other services, other people that have, I would say, skin in weather when these get created because as soon as it rolls forward, dependent on the status, it's gonna be available for time entry. It's gonna be available for our scheduling application. So timing and working around with our whole company is what they do when they decide which projects are up rolling forward through this app. Was that all your questions? I think that was all. I I think, yeah, I think you hit on all of them. That is that is a tremendous amount of projects. I can imagine this being a big time saver, as well as well for you. It is, that it was really a requirement. You had a good word for it when we talked earlier, but this was something we had to have before we went live with DSA because there there wasn't going to be the ability to do this manually. So we engaged Workday as part of our implementation to build this app for us and extend as we were rolling out PSA. Yeah. No. Preach appreciate you kinda describing that. Great app. They're definitely a good place to start. Right? But let's kind of, move to the second extend app, that that you build in, kinda put in production. Hold on. The the new customer slash project extend app. So and I definitely appreciate you providing the screenshot. I always think these are helpful. Right? It looks and feels just like Workday, but it's it's to me, it helps to kinda have that visual image on what does this look like from an end user perspective. So if you kind of really kinda go through the the same things within this particular app. So, we kinda got the name, but kind of what functionality that the the extend app provides, the users, ultimately kind of the problem that it solves. And then this one, I I know the previous one was, of course, a big time saver, but you definitely had some kind of ROI statistics here as well in terms of the amount of time saved. I'll confirm that for you. So this one's been a little more of a journey. It was also something we knew we were going to need to do when we have that volume of projects. For a number of reasons and revenue recognition, we've made the decision. One project is gonna have one contract. So we have the same number of contracts as we have projects. And we also set up one billing schedule per customer. All of that needs to be set up every time we're setting up these projects. And like I said, million active projects. Most of those are annual and getting set up. We have, we're approaching 300,000 customers. And there's, you know, more of that happening every week, every day, manually clicking through, not I would say because of the amount of demographics that we're adding, assigning roles, things like that. It takes us about forty five minutes to manually set up a customer and all the projects that go along with that customer if you're just clicking through it. So initially for go live, we created a bot that basically goes in, just uses the UI, takes information from an existing application, and puts it into a Workday user interface, that custom application itself as well as the bots would break, whether it was because we were making changes and what it was typing was no longer getting what it expected, Or if the UI shifted a little bit, the bot can't really read it and know where to go. So we had always known we needed a more permanent tool, and the bot couldn't finish it all the way. Our cuss our central billing team was still doing, call, ten to fifteen minutes depending on the new customer setup, how many projects they had, things like that. So what we wanted to build and extend was replace all of it. Replace the user interface where you're collecting the information to create a new client and create a new project, but we also wanted to build it to where whether they're using that user interface or it's coming from any other system including our CRM, MDM, anything like that, we'll be able to absorb it into Workday and in in a way that it's gonna be consistent from anywhere it's coming from. So extend created the user interfaces, but we also have an orchestration in the back end that can be triggered by I'm just gonna use our CRM as an example where if they have all the information that we were gonna be asking for, they can send that to the app. The app will consume it as if it was created within the user interface and go through all of the next steps. So instead of a brittle bot that will lose it based on updates, things like that, all the information has been checked and verified through that process. So we went from the basic forty five minutes is totally manual to just reading the form and making sure everything looks good and hit approve, and there's no time for a central billing team to set up these new projects and customers now. So if you get that from the CRM, you're getting a package where it automatically kinda goes behind the scenes or you also have the ability where extend provides that user experience where the end users can you kinda your billing team can really enter the data into that in kind of a streamline way and then it automatically kinda creates everything associated within that project. They know project, project plan, task, etcetera. Kind of all in the correct sequence. Correct? Correct. Yep. Exactly. There's there's a lot of logic we have in there that was institutional knowledge within our central billing team. If you do this, also do that. If you make these changes, these changes need to be made. So there's an administrative extend screens for that central billing team where they can manage that logic to make sure that when we create a new service, they can say these are the project plan templates to go with this service. These are other projects that need to get created when you create one of these projects. So they're managing that themselves in a secure administrative screen so that the orchestration knows what to combine when it's putting it all together. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really kind of a second, really great use case around projects. First, kind of the rollover of the now, how you can automate the creation of new projects and do it in in such a fast, efficient way, but specifically based on your logic as well. I'll work with one of my colleagues and he always cracks me if he's always got a line that extend in and kind of projects and PSA go together like peanut butter and chocolate. So, I mean, they just make it a really nice pairing together because you can kinda tailor specifically, to what you your as an organization. Of course, that would extend us. Right? Allows you to kinda take it and go beyond that core configuration, which she always done a fantastic job doing. So those are the first two apps you've got in production and kind of those mission critical apps. We have saved what I would consider the best for last. Right? So this is going to be an app that you're gonna be your team is gonna be showcasing it at Defcon here in just a little over a month away. So I'll I'll toggle to it what we call the the billing knowledge transfer extend app. So I know this has taken, you know, some time to kinda get there, but you definitely received massive benefits, from this extend app. So if you can kind of walk through, you know, kind of a functionality, the team that uses it, problems to solve, etcetera, like you did in the previous ones. Yeah. No problem. So we need better names for these apps because that doesn't really roll off the tongue. But may, purpose of this came from an internal process decision. So we, as a firm, had around half of our firms, so around 4,500 people involved in billing our clients. Every month, number of reasons, they were all involved whether it was giving input to the person that was creating the bill or billing, calling the customer, things like that. So when we were going live with PSA, we made the decision to go to that central billing team that I was talking about that manages the projects. So what we learned was we needed a way for the people that are doing the client service to be able to efficiently communicate with that central billing team and have all the information they need readily available to make the process fast. So in the accounting industry, we used to use web sheets. They've been around for a long time. There's a reason people try and get away from them. But the reason they were around is there's a lot of information. You can understand a lot of what you need to do with that client based on the information that was there. So we didn't want to train those 4,500 people to use manage project billing transactions because it didn't have all the information they needed to see. They would have to jump to other screens to be able to make the analysis they needed to provide to our central billing team. So we built this tool to be that collaboration minimum. So it's it's medium. Sorry. It's pulling up all this information from Workday and presenting it in a way that the project owner can read. They're looking at the same thing as, say, the in charge of the project. They can all add notes of what they need to bill, why they're billing it that way. Maybe there was something that was out of scope or it's a change order that they need to make the biller aware of. They enter that into the system. The central biller verifies, yes. I received this information. They have everything they need to use managed project billing transactions to actually create the invoice. That goes back to the customer owner who can say, yes. This invoice looks good. This met my expectation. And it's using I can never remember the name of the tool. When the alert comes in Workday, it pops up the same information so that it's aware of what's gonna be included in that invoice, metrics that are important to us before they even open the invoice. So we've made the process quite a bit faster for our client serving folks so that they can focus on client service rather than kind of the administration of billing. So this is a we think this is a conservative estimate around four hours a month of saving for those 2,500 owners and another 2,000 people that are involved in it. So it's a huge number of hours that are saved a year. The contrast of that is we have a central billing team now with about a 25 people. But we think that that's well worth it because the people that our client serving can now focus on the client service, and the folks that are creating the billing can have more, I would say, visibility into what's happening, whether that's industry specific or geography so that we can standardize as much as possible in a billing process that has been so segregated. Yeah. And I kind of see I've got two different slides for this. I've got kind of the the customer side, but then you've also got and switch over to kind of the the project level as well. So it's kind of two different aspects or two different kinda user experiences, for for this billing knowledge transfer app. And a lot of that's around, specific needs for that billing process. There's times where you need to look at a customer as a whole and all the projects that are active under it or even its related entities, and there's times where you're just looking at that project specifically. So they needed the ability to look at that summary both ways. Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic. And the kind of return on investment conservatively. Because because when you told us these numbers, I was like, wow. I mean, it's, fantastic. Over a 20,000 hours per year. I won't ask what CLA bills, right, for on an hourly basis, but if you kind of be conservative in terms of the estimate, definitely, you're the extend definitely pays for itself very quickly. I I I can imagine. It does. And this this is a mission critical app for us. It has to be up. It has to be maintained whether that's going through the two releases a year or changes we're working through it ourselves. So it we we treat it as such and it needs to be up and running and so far has been reliable. Yeah. And just got a quick commercial for Dev Con. This will be highlighted in even more depth and detail an entire session on this app. We'll talk about it a little bit later. In the follow-up email that we send out, you will have kind of a a link to Dev Con registration. So you've got a couple different whether it be in person or digital. Digital's free this year. So, kinda keep that in mind when you see that Defcon registration come out. So so great fantastic information there on kind of the three apps that, kind of mission critical apps you put in production there, Aaron. Here's kind of the the fireside chat. Right? Let's talk about really kind of extend as a whole, and, you know, kind of really CLA's journey with with an extend. So we talk about kind of those three apps, so you put a few more into production. One of the questions I often get, or they might ask other kind of customers is, you know, what's the typical length to deploy an extend app? And I know not one size fits all because you might have complexity there, but kinda tell me kind of the the top, the bottom, somewhere in the middle of what you might consider average based on your experience. Yeah. And it it does vary quite a bit based on the requirements and complexity. So we can have some pretty quick deployments where there's just a form or something we need to put out there. We have a good idea of what it's going what what is needed, what the process is going to be. I mean, you could do it in two months based on the level of testing and how much of your deployment cycle you work through. But the apps that we've been doing have been a little more complex. So the knowledge transfer app, for example, that was a year to build that and a lot of outside help we need to engage to be able to make it dysfunctional as we need it. So it you can't really give an answer other than it it depends on what you're trying to accomplish and thinking, okay, if I want something that's producing such a significant output like that knowledge transfer app or like the project roll forward, that's gonna take a lot longer than something that is, you know, like the demo we were looking at earlier where you're trying to collect some information in the form. You can create those very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. I can definitely see both sides of it. I've seen customers roll out to then extend out as fast as, you know, three days. You know, something very simple, very, and not not complex by any means. So you can definitely output it. But to your point, if you got something more on a complex side, it can take some significant time. But you've also got significant ROI with that as well too. So I appreciate that. So another question that kinda goes along with that, you know, I know you kind of started out with Workday service is building the extend app and then kinda work with one of our partners, but now it kinda brought it in house. Who's responsible for managing the extend apps within your organization? Could you tell us a little bit about how you're structured? You didn't know everything was IT's fault? That that's IT is your fault. No. That's not true. We have, like you said, our outside support has been very helpful. They've built these apps Even though we are building the internal knowledge inside of CliftonLarsonAllen, we use them and continue to use them. We use advisers as our, primary extend consultant. And even if we're building something and we're making changes, we're having them review them and make sure that, you know, what the decisions we've made in designing it makes sense, things like that. So they've been a wonderful partner. We've really enjoyed working with them. So we have them to support IT. IT is responsible for the technical functionality, the development, things like that. But the strategy and, you know, the the vision of what are we trying to accomplish, where is the pain, what is the point of doing this, that's coming from some business process leader. So we've identified who that process leader is that's gonna own the life cycle of this app because it's not we haven't found any apps where we put it in and we're just done. There's always more we wanna do with it, changes as our business change. So we have that business process owner identified, IT as the technical owner, and additional support either from Workday as well. I don't wanna say we don't get support from Workday. Workday cases work great, and then advisors as our outside consultant support. Yeah. I think you kinda bring up something interesting where it's it'd be great to have a single role where you can handle both the technical and the functional side, but I think that does tend to be pretty rare. And they kinda have counterparts there from the functional and the technical side. You can be able to work with it and kind of tag team that, not only from the implementation but also the support as well. It can definitely lead to it did a lot of success. Yep. Yeah. So you've put through, what, five extend apps in production, with those three kind of being mission critical. And I know you've got other apps kind of on the road map, there, but, you know, sometimes you get a long list of of apps and kind of requests that come in. Because once kind of extend usually kind of gets in within the organization, you know, word-of-mouth starts to kick in. Oh, I can do this. I can do that. We can build within Workday. How do you identify potential use cases for extended, a lot of times kinda rationalize it from top down in terms of importance? Yeah. Great question. I I think the the main thing we'd analyze when we're getting the request first is is there something Workday delivers that already does this? And Workday is always changing. There's always more functionality, so that's something we have to stay on top of. Ideally, we're gonna use Workday delivered functionality if we can. If for some reason it isn't there or let's use the knowledge transfer app, you know, we needed an aggregate view of something and then have that input option. That's when we'll start to think about, yeah, this could be built on extend, and we get together with our group that manages our platform to understand priorities of them are, what we're working on, how it's going to impact the business, how long we think it'll take to build kind of that cost benefit analysis. And as long as everything's working forward or working correctly here makes sense, then we move forward. Yeah. I think the cost benefit analysis is a big key to that. Right? I mean, so you might get a bill of something even though you'd love to have it there. If it if the cost doesn't make sense or the benefit isn't there, of course, it doesn't make sense to move forward. Yep. So couple questions kind of remaining in the fireside chat. We definitely got a kind of a larger audience on the call today. What what kind of best practices or strategies have you learned after deploying so many extend apps? Is there kind of a few kind of words of wisdom, if you will? I'm still kind of jarring from when you said three days to production. So I get that the technology can create the app very fast. That we've seen and it's absolutely true we have seen that. What I would say is we still are following our standard development life cycle, that we still really need to understand what are we building, go through a design phase, make sure we understand the requirements, do our testing before rolling it out, how it's gonna impact other processes around the firm, not just the technical side, but communication, that kind of thing for it. So, that would be my best practices. Don't don't skip your normal design processes. Even though you can build it very, very fast, you still need to go through the phases you would in any sort of development. Yeah. No no shortcuts. Right? Right. I mean, it'll technically work. You you can create it and put it out there. That will work. It's not the technology that's slowing it down. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And the three days, it was kinda time critical, at least for this customer's, sake to where the when the war on Ukraine spun up, they had to find a way to kinda really communicate with their workers. So there was definitely a reason for those three days. I'll wait to recommend it to your point, but we'll make it. So last question. I'll I'll kinda wrap it up again. We've got a kind of a larger audience here on the call. What advice would you give to kind of customers or participants that are kind of exploring extend? Maybe they might not have subscribed to extend yet but are considering it. Is there any kind of advice you might have for them based on your experience? First thing would be make sure you, you know, if you have a use case, there's probably a lot. It was very easy for us to find use cases. It really came down to which ones were our highest priority, not just finding one. And then where we really struggle is we wanted to be self sufficient, but it was very difficult in your, I guess, the history of extend you were showing the growth. And a lot of that growth has been in the last few years. It's difficult to find that expertise. Advisors has been a wonderful partner for that. So they've been very willing to come alongside of us, help train our people to be able to get us from having an idea of what we wanna do to how we can actually manage the app now and be self sufficient. So don't let that you don't have the experience slow you down. It's really the, I would say use case. And if you have that, moving forward with a partner works really, really well. Yeah. And I think you've taken a similar journey than a lot of than than a lot of our customers do. You know, they all tend to might work before the services or certified extend partner to get started. And then you can kind of choose based on the complexity, maybe bandwidth, your IT team, etcetera, on when you wanna start kind of getting into the extend mix, there and start kind of developing. Sometimes I've seen where it might be at, you know, two or sometimes it might be at four or five or so further on and really all the partners will traditionally kinda meet you where you're at. Do you wanna do take on a little bit? Do you wanna co develop? Do you just kinda it's your point right now if you're building, but you want kind of guidance a little bit, design, guidance, things like that. So, I think with what you've run across is pretty difficult there. Well, first, I can't thank you enough, Aaron. It's been a a fantastic kind of fireside chat, not only walking through your apps, but then also kind of, ask, you know, answering several questions here on kind of your extend journey. So appreciate your time. But now we're kind of at the the q and a session, if if you will. And I've got kind of my counterpart, Sam, Shah back on stage here to kind of walk through or, like, kind of any questions, whether it be for Aaron or kind of the Workday team here, that might be kind of top of mind. A lot of questions for Aaron. I'll I'll start with just a specific question on the apps that you had gone over here. So for the quick rule forward app, how long does it take to roll the that depends a lot on how many we're rolling forward. We have to be careful because it is using system resources. We did do I think we were trying to roll forward, like, 250,000 at once. I was an oops. It it used a lot of our resources. Took it about ten minutes for Workday to come back up and start functioning for everybody there. So now we chunk it up, and it runs in the background. They'll run, I'd say, anywhere from ten to twenty minutes, and we'll do twenty thousand, twenty five thousand at a time, somewhere around there. It does vary quite a bit, though. So I'm going off of secondhand knowledge from our central billing team. But the one thing I know is don't do too many at once. That I'm certain. The next question is around just your internal development team is making the move or making the move to, building applications with Xtend. Did you receive any pushback from them? I did not. This was something we knew we were going to do. So my peer that's in charge of our internal development and I met quite a bit on it, discussed the strategy. In our platform management of extend, we have our own developers as well that's separate from our external developers that are creating applications that the business is using. So we're focused within the development team in the ERP operations team, but we still follow the same processes as close as we can. We're still beholden to the same change management that they are that's just unique to their skill set so they can be focused on Workday. So Yeah. If there's something that could be built either way, we have that communication first to say, where where is the best place to go with this? And there continues to be those discussions even after we've built tools. Yeah. No. Absolutely. And and just from my conversation with customers and with developers, like, the feedback from the developer community has been really positive because from a development perspective, it's a lot easier to build these applications, right, that have something to do with people with money inside of work. You don't really have to worry about the UI as much as the UI is already there as opposed to build a standalone system or standalone task solution where you're not only are you building the actual workflow, but you're also having to worry about the Wi Fi as well. Oh, yeah. And the the platform, where are you getting the data from, identity recognition? Recognition, all these things are already done. Those are big deal when you're building an application from scratch so that we're able to just meet these functions. We can do things like that roll forward that if we were to build it outside of the system, would require a lot more overhead than it does inside of Workday. Yeah. Absolutely. Going going back to the the project plan app, is the distinction between in scope and out of scope, working progress driven by the project plan tasks itself? Yeah. There I mean, it that was probably coming from an accounting firm. I don't know. Really, any professional services, it's as good as you enter time. Yes. There's a task in there that says out of out of scope. So if they see that, that makes it a lot easier. But the idea is to give multiple platforms for communication. So whether it's in the task or they're saying, hey. This happened, and they can just put it in notes to the billing sent the central biller. Either way, we're trying to identify those. Sure. And then for the new customer project, custom extend app created, everything customer and project, does that also create contract and billing schedules? It does. It creates everything we need. It assigns the roles, contract the billing schedules, all the all of the steps, the the whole process. So that that was really what took the time for that one. It wasn't just creating the customer and the project objects. It's everything that goes along with it and meet making it all meet our standards. Sure. How big is CLA's internal development team? For I'm gonna say for extend specifically, there are four people that are focusing on extend. The development team that supporting extend is 10, but they're, you know, also doing integrations, things like that that they're responsible for. Sure. And then how do you track project ideas that are not approved yet or that you might be considering? So that's part of our platform management. We're using a similar, I I would say change in ITIL process that we use for the rest of IT. It's just exclusive for our ERP. So whether that's coming from service leaders, other parts of the business, or something we've recognized from within our technical groups, it all is going into the same demand list where we're have a central group with your standard governance as executive team, leadership team, and your change management, and they're processing it through there, regardless of where it comes from. Sure. Jason, this one's this one's for you. Can you kinda go through the application life cycle, like, the development, tenant, the test environment? How does how does it go into production? Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So Shail kind of demonstrated that the dev side. So that's really where you're going to work with your dev tenant or your developer tenant for that. If you're kind of familiar with it, the GMS tenant, it doesn't have your data in it. So it's kind of seeded with dummy data and that's what you are going to develop in. And then, ultimately, you're kind of leveraging that kind of software development life cycle to push it through this series of of of of tenants to where it goes from developer. And then an impl tenant is required as part of extend. So if you've already got one, a lot of times you'll just use that. If not, that's something we can kind of add as part of the extensive script then. Then we'll go from developer tenant, then it go to implementation tenant. And then, ultimately, you can go ahead and push it to sandbox and then production. But that implementation tenant, of course, you can kinda control when it's refreshed. So it's something that when you push over, that's where you're gonna do a lot of your testing in is that implementation tenant. But still kind of walking through that entire, software development life cycle as far as far from a from a tenant standpoint. Yep. And then the developer tenant's the new type of tenant that you all get with the extent. Right? It's part of the subscription, and that's where you would you'll only have before you move it into production. Correct. And a developer tenant is included as part of the with with the extent subscription for essentials. Customers get one developer tenant. With professional, you get three developer tenants. Great. Well, again again, Aaron, thank you so much for agreeing to participate in today's webinar and for sharing sharing your amazing apps, with the broader work we do. Just a few quick announcements before we wrap up. We have a another customer spotlight webinar coming up on May 22, where we're gonna be featuring brands, and they're gonna be showcasing their bonus calculation app. So be sure to register if you're interested in learning more, and I'll be sharing all of the registration needs to, to this after the webinar as well as the recording. The next is DevCon, which, Jason had mentioned, a few times during this presentation. It's happening the June at Resorts World Las Vegas. There is also a virtual option available for those of you who are not able to attend attend in person. But there's gonna be a ton of great content, a ton of great examples. And then we're gonna have, you know, great customers like CLA who's gonna be presenting and sharing their sharing their apps there as well. So, if, if you're interested in attending, please please register, and I'll be sharing this registration all today. And that wraps up our session. Again, thank you all so much for joining, and a big thank you for Aaron, for for just sharing sharing the amazing apps that you all have built. But, of course, we really appreciate it. And, that concludes our webinar. Thank you, and have a great work day.