Let’s start with some trivia… 🧠🤓
Who quietly keeps everything running — no cape, no spotlight, just efficiency with a smile…
🤔 🤔 🤔
Did you guess your mom? 😁
Don’t worry. This isn’t a ‘yo momma’ joke.
The answer is “MOM” though…
…short for Mass Operation Management 😎
Workday’s MOM may not have perfected a mean meatloaf, but it can keep everything running smoothly in the background to complete a large number of tasks in the blink of an eye, tidy up your system, and keep BPs movin’ 💃🏻
So, what exactly is Mass Operation Management and how does it work?
Let’s get into it.
The series
📍Part 1 (you’re here): How to run mass operations in Workday
Part 2: MOM security, configuration, and scheduling
What is MOM?
MOM is a function that lets you use a custom report to drive mass actions across your tenant on an ad-hoc or scheduled basis.
That’s the heart of it. There’s a ton that it can do, but here are the main “mass” actions:
Manage high-volume business processes. Think actions like advancing, canceling, reassigning, and escalating steps.
Initiate transactions. Most commonly staffing events like Termination or End Contingent Worker Contract (experienced a RIF, anyone?)
Add or remove employees from comp cycles, or edit data for an in-progress compensation review.
To give you a better sense for what’s available to you, here’s a table of our favorites:
(⚠️ Heads up: If your input report returns more results than the limit listed in the last column, MOM doesn't process anything at all.)
And the list keeps growing! Workday regularly adds MOM types across functional areas. Check out the standard report View Mass Operation Types for a comprehensive list. As of this issue, there are 43 types (one is listed as DNU).
The report View Mass Operation Type shows each operation type, its description, security segment, and the security groups currently with access to it.
But that’s the community-level overview 😉 Here’s what some real-life scenarios look like where MOM comes into play:
You realize there’s no process in place to manage outstanding business process steps for terminated workers — they just linger out there! You can use MOM to identify the steps and mass cancel them on a schedule.
Despite countless reminders you’ve sent, there are 500 outstanding performance reviews you need to move onto the next step. You can use MOM to mass advance them.
There’s always that one manager who refuses to log in to Workday, leaving 30 PTO approvals sitting in their inbox. You can use MOM to mass escalate them to the manager's manager after a certain number of days sitting stale.
Situations like these are exactly what MOM was built for. We’d love to say you can’t relate, but let’s be honest, you probably can!
Knocking out in minutes what used to take hours of clicking through the UI might feel like magic ✨ But as you know, “magic” doesn’t exist… it’s a delightful set of actions operating in smooth succession.
So instead of remaining dazzled by the outcome, let’s bring you into what it takes to tee up the MOM trick.
This is where the good stuff lives.
Free builds awareness. Premium fills all the gaps 🦄
Below:
How to set up your first MOM process from start to finish
Size up any cleanup and know whether MOM is right for the job
Build a custom report MOM can select (there are gotcha’s!)
Configure the run: notifications, reasons, and a review safety net
Clean up your tenant in a few big swoops, saving you the hassle of a million little clicks
Plus everything else in Premium:
⭐️ Release Ratings & Reviews
🔐 Full archive access
🗳️ A say in what gets built
