Here are some examples of how some of the biggest companies in the world are using Workday.
Early Childhood Education · Portland, OR
KinderCare runs its entire payday operation on Workday. The company employs tens of thousands of teachers and center staff across more than 2,000 child care sites in 40 states, and Workday Payroll is the system that makes sure every one of them gets paid correctly and on time.
That is a harder job than it sounds. Most of KinderCare's workforce is hourly, so pay depends on time worked, and every state and city has its own wage and tax rules. Workday holds all of that in one place: the hours people clock, their earnings and deductions, their time off, and the tax settings for each location.
The tax side alone is a full-time concern. Every time KinderCare opens a center in a new town, someone has to set up new payroll tax accounts and keep the rates current in Workday so withholdings come out right. The system is also where the company reconciles its tax filings and balances year-end forms like W-2s, working alongside a tool from ADP that handles the actual tax payments to governments.
Payroll is where it started, but Workday has grown into KinderCare's system for running the whole back office. The same platform now handles hiring, benefits, and time off on the people side, plus accounting, budgeting, and purchasing on the money side. Workday replaced a patchwork of older systems, which were switched off once everything moved over.
Twice a year, Workday pushes out big updates to all its customers. Before each one goes live, KinderCare tests its payroll setup against the new version to make sure nothing breaks, because a glitch in this system means someone's paycheck is wrong.
Healthcare · Sacramento, CA
Sutter Health uses Workday as the system behind its workforce: paying people, managing their benefits, tracking time off, and handling retirement plans. For one of Northern California's largest hospital networks, that means keeping pay and benefits running for doctors, nurses, and staff across dozens of hospitals and care centers.
Rather than letting each hospital handle this on its own, Sutter runs it all from one central hub. A shared services team supports the entire network from a single Workday setup, which is how they keep pay, time off, and benefits consistent whether someone works in a big city hospital or a small clinic.
Healthcare adds a wrinkle most companies don't have. Workday can't operate as an island; it has to exchange information with the clinical and scheduling systems hospitals run on, using the special data formats the healthcare world speaks. A big part of Sutter's Workday work is building and maintaining those connections so employee information flows cleanly between systems.
Sutter also pushes Workday data beyond day-to-day operations and into decision-making. The company has used Workday's analytics tools to build reports and dashboards for its finance group and its self-funded employee health plan, turning workforce and cost data into something leaders can act on.
Insurance · Chicago, IL
CNA runs the money side of its insurance business through Workday Financials. The company uses it to manage its ledger, pay vendors, process employee expense reports, and handle purchasing across its operations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Singapore.
The scale of the everyday activity is what stands out. Hundreds of people at CNA process vendor payments through Workday, and thousands more file their travel and expense reports through it. Behind the scenes, the accounts payable operation uses the system to catch duplicate payments, capture early-pay discounts from vendors, and guard against fraud.
Keeping all that running takes real engineering. CNA builds custom connections using Workday's developer tools so financial data flows correctly between Workday and the company's other systems, from daily pay cycles to the feeds that support closing the books each period.
Workday also carries compliance weight at CNA. As a publicly traded insurer, the company leans on the system for audit controls and financial reporting obligations, plus regulatory tasks like 1099 tax reporting and returning unclaimed payments to states, which all 50 states require.
The people side runs on Workday too. CNA uses the HR modules for recruiting, performance reviews, and employee learning, with a dedicated owner steering that part of the platform. But finance is where the company has gone deepest, treating Workday as the backbone of how money moves through the business.
Financial Regulation · Washington, DC
FINRA, the organization that polices Wall Street's brokerage firms, runs its own books on Workday. The regulator uses Workday Financials for its general ledger, vendor payments, customer billing, purchasing, expenses, and banking.
Closing the books is where the system earns its keep. At the end of every month, quarter, and year, FINRA's accounting work runs through Workday, and the setup has to reflect formal accounting standards so the numbers hold up.
Keeping that machine tuned is ongoing work. Twice a year Workday releases major updates, and FINRA tests and rolls out each one, along with new features and modules as the platform grows. The organization also keeps tight control over its core financial data, like its chart of accounts and supplier lists, so reports stay trustworthy.
Workday is also how FINRA understands its own workforce. The people side of the house uses Workday's reporting tools to track headcount, turnover, and internal moves, turning that data into dashboards that leaders use for planning.
There's a push to make that self-serve, so managers can pull their own answers from a standard library of reports instead of filing a request and waiting. It's part of a broader shift from reacting to data questions toward spotting workforce trends before anyone asks.
Infrastructure · The Woodlands, TX
Ferrovial, the Spanish company behind some of the world's biggest highways and airports, uses Workday as the home for everything HR. The most recent move: shifting payroll for its North American operations onto the platform, covering the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico.
What makes that tricky is how the business is structured. Ferrovial's North American workforce of more than 5,000 people is spread across 26 different companies, each with its own quirks, and Workday has to handle pay, benefits, and time tracking for all of them from one system.
Benefits are a good example of the detail involved. The rules for who qualifies for which health plan, at what rates, live inside Workday, and they have to be updated as the business changes. The platform also connects directly to the outside insurance companies that run those plans, so enrollment information flows to them automatically.
With the payroll rollout done, the focus has turned to making it all run smoother. Ferrovial is working to standardize its HR processes and is bringing in AI and automation to cut down on manual work, with the goal of handling routine payroll and HR tasks with less human effort.
Healthcare · McLean, VA
Somatus, a kidney care company that helps patients with chronic conditions stay healthy at home, is in the middle of moving its payroll onto Workday. The company is switching off its old payroll system and rebuilding everything, from tax setups to employee deductions, inside the new platform.
The move covers more than 1,200 employees spread across multiple states, which is where the complexity lives. Every state and city where someone works has its own tax rules, and each one has to be set up correctly in Workday before the switch flips.
The safety net during a change like this is called parallel testing. Somatus runs payroll in both the old system and Workday at the same time, then compares the results line by line. Any mismatch gets logged and fixed before Workday takes over for real.
The timing adds pressure. The transition spans year-end, the most delicate stretch of the payroll calendar, when tax filings have to be closed out and W-2s balanced. Somatus has to land the cutover without dropping any of that, then verify the first quarter in the new system comes out clean.
It's a reminder that behind every product like Workday, there's an unglamorous moment every customer goes through: the migration. Getting from the old system to the new one without a single missed or wrong paycheck is its own project, with its own playbook.
Automotive Services · Charlotte, NC
Driven Brands, the company behind Take 5 Oil Change, Meineke, Maaco, and CARSTAR, uses Workday to run HR across its whole family of car care brands. One system handles hiring, pay, benefits, and time tracking for a workforce spread over thousands of service locations.
The moments when everyone is in the system at once get special attention. Annual raise and bonus cycles run through Workday, with the rules about who is eligible for what built right into the platform. Same for open enrollment, the yearly window when employees pick their health plans, where Workday decides which plans each person can choose and processes the signups.
Pay itself runs through Workday too, and not just in the United States. The company processes payroll for its Canadian employees in the system as well, on top of multi-state American payroll that spans weekly and every-two-weeks pay schedules.
With that many people and locations feeding data in, mistakes are inevitable, so Driven Brands audits constantly. Regular checks inside Workday catch bad data before it flows downstream and turns into a wrong paycheck.
The structure of the business lives in the system as well. Workday holds the map of who reports to whom, which location everyone works at, and which budget their pay comes from, a map that has to stay current as the company keeps acquiring and opening new locations.
Telecommunications · New York, NY
Verizon doesn't just use Workday, it builds on top of it. The telecom giant treats Workday as its core HR platform and then develops its own custom applications using Workday Extend, a toolkit that lets companies create apps that run inside the system itself.
Underneath those custom apps, Workday handles the full journey of a Verizon employee: hiring, pay, benefits, raises, time off, and learning. The company describes this internally as the "hire to retire" ecosystem, meaning the system follows a person from their first day to their last.
Making that work at Verizon's size is a plumbing job of its own. Dedicated engineers connect Workday to the rest of the company's technology, moving employee data securely between systems and monitoring those connections around the clock, with automatic alerts and even self-healing fixes when a data feed breaks.
The newest push is AI. Verizon is rolling out Workday's artificial intelligence features, things like conversational assistants and predictions drawn from workforce data, and is evaluating outside AI tools for hiring, such as software that helps rank job candidates, then wiring them into Workday.
The goal running through all of it is a simpler workday for employees. Fewer manual steps, faster answers to HR questions, and a system smart enough to handle the routine stuff on its own.
Health Insurance · Indianapolis, IN
Elevance Health, the Fortune 25 insurer behind Anthem health plans, runs its hiring machine on Workday. Workday Recruiting is the company's applicant tracking system, the software that manages every job opening from posting to offer letter.
What's striking is how much is plugged into it. Workday sits at the center of a web of hiring tools: Paradox runs the career site and schedules interviews, HiredScore uses AI to help evaluate candidates, HireRight handles background checks, and DocuSign collects signatures on offers. Workday keeps all of them in sync so a candidate's information flows through without anyone retyping it.
Keeping those handoffs reliable is treated as serious business. If the connection between Workday and a background check vendor hiccups, hiring stalls, so the company monitors these data exchanges closely and digs into the root cause when something breaks.
For a health insurer, who can see what is just as important. Elevance puts real effort into Workday security, controlling which employees can access which records and auditing that access regularly, since the system holds sensitive information on tens of thousands of people.
The data doesn't just sit there, either. Elevance blends Workday information with other sources to study its own workforce, using statistical models to understand things like which employees might be at risk of leaving, and turning those findings into retention strategy.
Healthcare · Louisville, KY
Baptist Health, a hospital system serving Kentucky and Indiana, uses Workday as the operating system for its business side. The platform covers finance, HR, and supply chain for an organization of more than 25,000 employees, part of a larger move of these functions to the cloud.
The volume of connections is what jumps out. Workday has to talk to a long list of outside vendors, like benefits providers and payroll partners, and each specialist on the team owns thirty or more of these data pipelines. Those connections run around the clock, every day of the year, and someone has to fix them when they break.
Open enrollment shows why that plumbing matters. When employees pick their health plans each fall, their choices have to flow from Workday to the insurance companies without errors, so the enrollment-related connections get extra attention and testing during that stretch.
Compensation runs deep in the system too. The rules behind base pay, merit raises, bonuses, and incentive programs are all configured in Workday, and the annual raise cycle for the whole health system runs through it.
Given that Workday holds pay and personal data for tens of thousands of healthcare workers, access is tightly managed. Dedicated staff review who can see what, run audits, and retest security settings every time Workday ships an update.
Artificial Intelligence · San Francisco, CA
Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, runs its people operations on Workday, with payroll at the center. The system holds the machinery of getting people paid: earnings and deductions, pay schedules, time-off rules, and overtime calculations.
Growth is what makes the job interesting. Anthropic is scaling fast, and Workday has to keep up with constant reorganizations, updates to the job catalog, and the recurring big moments like annual compensation reviews and benefits open enrollment.
There's a house rule embedded in how the work splits up. The payroll team runs payroll, but the systems side owns the configuration underneath it, so when a paycheck calculation comes out wrong, one group traces the math while the other fixes the settings that caused it.
True to form, the company points its own AI at the work. The team uses Anthropic's tools in daily workflows, applying AI to things like testing, documentation, and sorting incoming help tickets, and treats "the way it's always been done" as a question rather than an answer.
Financial Data & Media · New York, NY
Bloomberg runs HR for its 20,000 employees on Workday, and then wires it into everything else the company has built. The financial data giant treats Workday as the official record of its people, feeding that information to its payroll system, its own homegrown compensation tools, and even the Bloomberg Terminal itself.
The scale of that wiring is unusual. Bloomberg's engineers maintain hundreds of custom connections flowing in and out of Workday, and the company staffs actual software engineers, not just system administrators, to build them. When Workday's standard features aren't enough, they write their own apps that run on top of the platform.
Payroll shows how deliberate the setup is. Bloomberg kept an older system, PeopleSoft, for paying employees around the world, so every pay period depends on employee data moving cleanly from Workday into PeopleSoft. Keeping those two systems in agreement is a job in itself.
Inside HR, Workday handles the everyday programs people actually feel: health benefits, time off, and leaves of absence for staff spread across more than 150 offices worldwide. Analysts refine those setups constantly, reconciling data and fixing issues before changes go live.
With operations in that many countries, privacy law hangs over all of it. Bloomberg maintains dedicated security expertise for Workday, designing who can access what and keeping the whole arrangement compliant with rules like Europe's GDPR privacy law.
Tait Communications
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Electro Optic Systems
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City of Corona
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St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton
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Sandoval County Government
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Deutsche Apotheker- und Ärztebank - apoBank
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ORPEA
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Bright Health
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Monroe County
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TECNALIA Research & Innovation
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Septodont
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Regnology
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Lumus Imaging
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Bolton Clarke
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Aztec Group
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Lindsay Australia Ltd
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Fidia Pharma
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Enovis
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Orion Steel
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Bentley Systems
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KinderCare
Sutter Health
CNA Insurance
FINRA
Ferrovial
Somatus
Driven Brands
Verizon
Elevance Health
Baptist Health
Anthropic
Bloomberg
