ERP Ancillary Systems Program

Character Limits

Currently, almost all UW–Madison ancillary systems are receiving data from the Human Resources System (HRS) as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) with a 30 character limit. Under ASCII, 1 byte = 1 character.

Workday will make data available as UTF8 (Unicode Transformation Format – 8-bit) without character limits. Under UTF8, 1 character does not always use 1 byte. UTF8 characters can take up to 4 bytes.

Data Elements Impacted

The transition to unlimited characters can impact any data element from Workday. This includes, but is not limited to: legal name, name in use (formerly preferred name), supervisory organization name, cost center org name, and position title.

IAM infrastructure will truncate all data elements from Workday to 1,024 bytes and a version of name will be made available at 30 characters. There will be 4 versions of name made available from Workday via IAM integrations:

  • Legal name with unformatted/ UTF8 characters and 1,024 byte limit
  • Legal name with formatted/ASCII characters and 30 character limit
  • Name in use (formerly preferred name) with unformatted/ UTF8 characters and 1,024 byte limit
  • Name in use (formerly preferred name) with formatted/ASCII characters and 30 character limit

Start Testing Now

Ancillary system owners need to start testing now:

  • Determine whether your systems have field sizes limitations (and what those limitations are).
  • Explore how you will manage a potential increase in characters if fields in your system have known character limits.
    • For example: Last name capped at 30 characters or department capped at 64 characters.
  • If possible, setup or configure a test environment for your ancillary system.
    • A test environment will be invaluable to test new data from Workday.
  • Ancillary Systems with a final disposition of “N/A” that consume identity data from IAM infrastructure are impacted by these changes and will need to test.
  • Update your system’s test plans (or create a test plan) to take into consideration the known data changes.
    • Ancillary system owners are responsible for creating and executing test plans for each ancillary system. Manifest/Grouper group owners are also responsible for creating and executing test plans for their groups.  IAM will make the data available, but IAM does not know how each ancillary system works.

IAM is actively working on updates to infrastructure to allow for ancillary system owner testing. IAM will:

  • Communicate with system owners directly when testing options and data become available.
  • Ask ancillary system owners if their system can consume unlimited characters.