Putting HR Back in Charge: The Veeva Solution for Integrated Roster Management

The average new hire onboarding process involves 54 steps, including signing documents, administrative tasks, and training. If that sounds like a lot for a new employee to do, imagine the back-office work required to support these 54 steps.

I once worked with a life sciences company with a field rep setup process that exemplified how complicated things can get.

The process was highly manual and fragile. If the HR manager forgot to send an email or if IT made a mistake on the load file, it would delay new field reps from being able to call on their healthcare professionals (HCPs).

As a product manager at Veeva, I have spoken with many other pharmaceutical companies that have experienced onboarding delays due to complicated manual processes between their HR and IT teams.

To help bridge this gap between HR and IT teams, Veeva joined Workday’s partner program to support our customers looking to simplify their HR processes. Through this partnership, we’ve built an integration from Align to Workday Human Capital Management.

Building an interconnected commercial landscape

Veeva Commercial Cloud is designed to maximize speed and efficiency, with prebuilt integrations that put your data right where it needs to be so you can use it to make efficient and informed decisions.

The new integration represents the first time Veeva has delivered a standard connection between an HR master like Workday to Veeva Commercial Cloud.

As soon as organizations hire new field team members, their Workday information will integrate with Align automatically and remain updated, so you can always work with the most up-to-date roster data when planning your field force.

This integration has three main use cases: new hire onboarding, employee information updates, and employee offboarding.

New Hire Onboarding

This first use case focuses on helping HR simplify the new hire setup. With the integration, recruits are entered once in Workday — and that’s it. Align detects when new field users enter into Workday and will import their information into new roster entries.

HR has total control over what information gets shared to Align from Workday. Using Workday’s built-in Reporting-as-a-Service capability, HR can set parameters on which users and fields Align can access and ensure that your employees’ personal information is secure.

After the new roster members are created in Align, Align passes the new roster and territory assignment information to Veeva Vault CRM. Vault CRM creates new user records with access to the correct product baskets, accounts, and permissions corresponding to each user’s role and territory.

HR can provide the information that powers three systems from just one data entry point, leading to a faster onboarding process with fewer errors.

Employee Updates

Employee information is dynamic and constantly changing, whether it’s a new name, a new title, a new address, a new email, or something else entirely. The second use case for this integration makes it easy to keep your employee data up to date.

IT administrators can schedule the integration to run automatically at regular intervals. Each time the integration runs, all Align roster records from Workday will update with the latest Workday data.

When HR changes an employee’s information in Workday, the integration will push the changes downstream into Align and Vault CRM, taking one more maintenance task off IT’s plate while ensuring accuracy and consistency across systems.

Offboarding

The third use case covered by the integration deals with employee offboarding. Organizations may overlook certain manual tasks when an employee needs to be offboarded or removed from the system. For example, if user permissions are not revoked in time, IT risks potential security breaches or information leakage from employees who are no longer with the company.

Through the integration, Align can consume employee last-day data from Workday and take remedial action on a scheduled date. The process is automated. The employee’s Vault CRM access will be removed, and the territory assigned to them will be vacated.

All HR needs to do is mark the employee’s last day in Workday. The integration takes care of the process through Align and Vault CRM.

Moving faster, together

We’re long past the point where “digital” is a new word in the industry. Many life sciences companies are already using the latest digital solutions to go to market more efficiently.

However, while many of these systems promise more speed, they can be easily slowed down if they don’t have the right connections to communicate with each other. Lack of communication can result in data silos: disparate systems that lead to inconsistent data, manual processes, re-work—and, ironically, a loss of speed.

We’ve been working on a series of innovations aimed at breaking these silos so you can focus on executing and achieving your business goals.

The Workday integration we built is just the latest in this series, and we look forward to showing you the rest of our roadmap to help your Veeva solutions operate better together.

The integration from Workday is just one feature of Align that enables simpler, speedier field planning. Discover Align on the Align product page.

^{1. “10 employee onboarding statistics you must know in 2022”, Sapling HR, 2022.}