As a Workday user, you’re likely aware that it delivers two major releases and weekly service updates each year. However, despite rigorous testing by the Workday team, these updates can still impact customized processes and critical integrations—making Workday testing crucial. Due to the frequency of these updates, many organizations rely on managed testing services. Yet, Workday managed testing services come with their own set of challenges and limitations.
In this blog, we’ll explain why Workday managed testing services may not be a viable long-term solution. We’ll also introduce Opkey’s test automation platform as a more scalable, cost-effective, and sustainable approach to supporting your Workday digital transformation.
Beyond Managed Testing Services: Learn how Opkey gives you better control and agility with Workday. Download the Guide
Why Workday Managed Testing Services aren’t a viable solution
Many organizations embrace Workday to reduce HR operational costs, improve financial performance, enhance efficiency, and promote positive team morale. As every organization has its own set of objectives, the same is true for its business processes. Every organization follows its unique business processes, differentiating it from the competitors. In such a scenario, standard testing practices will not be sustainable solution. Here’s why:
Test Gaps
Whether your managed testing services vendor relies on manual approaches or uses a testing tool, significant gaps often exist. Manual testing depends heavily on the personal judgment and experience of individual testers, making it inconsistent and error-prone.
If they rely on tools, these are often RPA-based and built on the consulting firm’s own standardized testing practices. As a result, test scenarios under managed testing services are frequently template-driven and fail to reflect your organization’s unique workflows, roles, and configurations. This misalignment can lead to critical gaps in test coverage, resulting in compliance risks or broken business processes after an update.
Slower Adoption of Workday Updates
Organizations often configure Workday to meet their unique business requirements, and it frequently integrates with third-party applications such as CRMs to enhance business processes. As a result, Workday’s semi-annual updates require rapid regression testing to ensure business continuity. However, managed testing teams often operate on fixed schedules, leading to delays in update readiness and putting critical operations—such as payroll and HCM—at risk.
Limited Agility to Meet Market Demands
To keep pace with market dynamics, organizations often modify their existing business processes or introduce new ones by enhancing integrations with other productivity tools. This is where business-as-usual (BAU) testing becomes essential. However, overreliance on managed service providers often limits visibility into the testing process and reduces control over timelines, making it difficult to respond quickly to urgent changes or issues.
Manual Burden
Despite outsourcing, organizations still face challenges, as even minor modifications and testing require coordination with the service provider. Since business users already have full workloads, this additional involvement is often seen as a burden.
Higher Costs Over Time
Engaging an external team for every update cycle, along with ongoing business-as-usual testing, significantly increases costs over time. Unlike automation platforms, managed services offer limited scalability and can strain IT budgets in the long run.
Migrate to Opkey’s Workday Lifecycle Optimization Platform
Opkey is the industry’s first Agentic AI powered Workday Lifecycle Optimization platform that delivers a smarter, more agile alternative for Workday environments. Opkey empowers teams with AI-powered impact analysis, self-healing test automation, and process-driven test coverage—all within a no-code platform. It enables HR, Finance, and business users to independently manage testing, adapt to updates, and even convert test cases into training assets. By supporting the entire Workday lifecycle—from implementation to updates to training—Opkey ensures faster adoption, reduced risk, and continuous business readiness.
Unique Opkey Differentiators
- Workday Lifecycle Optimization – AI-powered, no-code, end-to-end Workday test automation platform for implementation, updates, UAT, and training.
- AI-Driven Impact Analysis – Handles Workday semi-annual updates with automated impact analysis, test case recommendations, and regression execution.
- Business Process Discovery – Built-in AI-driven discovery captures actual Workday usage to drive accurate test coverage.
- Self-Healing Automation – Automatically adapts test scripts to UI/process changes after updates—no manual intervention required.
- Test Customization & Flexibility – Fully customizable test scenarios based on your live business processes and roles.
- Business User Enablement – No-code platform enables HR, Finance, and business users to create and run tests easily.
- Audit Readiness – Automatically generates step-by-step test evidence for UAT, SOX, and compliance audits.
- AI Powered Training – Converts test cases into simulation-based training assets and guides.
Learn how Opkey paved the way to modernized Workday management for a leading construction company. Read the Case Study
