One company I worked for used a third party performance management tool. We would get exported PDFs of employee reviews at the end of each review cycle and we would load them into Workday. This worked well enough until we were informed that the most recent batch of 3000+ documents were incorrect.
My partner in crime, the HRIS Manager was about to have kittens, thinking we had to manually delete each of those documents, as there is no way to mass delete worker documents in Workday.
This is where I brought up the idea of using a Boomerang I had developed as part of a Workday HAckathon for a larger project.
Basically, I discovered that I was able to reassign a document to a different worker than where it currently resided in Workday. Using this as a starting point we followed the following pattern:
- Create a Custom Report that listed all the documents we wanted to delete along with any pertinent data (WID of the document, the binary of the document, and the filename.
- Contract a “fake” (placeholder) Contingent Worker.
- Build and deploy a Studio integration that used the Custom Report as a data source and would reassign the document to the newly contract “fake” Contingent Worker (BTW we named it “Document Deletion”).
- After confirming all documents had be reassigned, we ended the Contingent Worker contract.
- We then built a Custom Report that just list the “Fake” Contingent Worker and tagged it for Purge.
- We then Purged Data, using the Purge Report. This effectively erased all data about the Contingent Worker from our tenant, including the reassigned documents.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, please reach out to us. The solution can be customized and deployed to your tenant and executed within a few hours time.