Oracle PeopleSoft and Workday HCM integration

What moves between them

The main flow runs from Workday into PeopleSoft. Worker records, job assignments, organizations, and cost centers are read from Workday on a daily or weekly schedule and synced into PeopleSoft's employee directory and job component, keyed by employee ID. This keeps PeopleSoft headcount in agreement with Workday hires, terminations, and job changes. Cost center and organization data flows both directions to ensure Workday payroll allocations land on valid PeopleSoft GL dimensions. PeopleSoft's self-hosted architecture means each customer has a unique hostname and authentication model, so the mapping of credential sets and the polling schedule are configured per customer.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores both credential sets encrypted and manages OAuth2 token refresh on the Workday side, automatically refreshing the 60-minute access token before it expires. On the PeopleSoft side, it accepts the customer's unique hostname and port since there is no shared API base URL, and uses HTTP Basic Auth or OAuth2 depending on the customer's PeopleSoft version. Because both systems are pull-only, it polls Workday and PeopleSoft on a schedule tied to your payroll and HR calendar. It reads worker and job records from Workday's REST API, translates them to PeopleSoft SOAP Component Interface format, and posts them to the customer's unique PeopleSoft instance. Workday enforces rate limiting with HTTP 429 responses and Retry-After headers, so ml-connector backs off and retries intelligently. Cost centers and organizations are mapped first so every worker record references dimensions that already exist in PeopleSoft. Every record carries a full audit trail and can be replayed if a downstream write fails.

A real-world example

A mid-sized financial services firm runs Oracle PeopleSoft on its own servers for accounting, procurement, and GL management, and uses Workday HCM for payroll and talent across multiple regions. Before the integration, HR and finance operated separate systems with duplicate employee records. When a new hire came in through Workday, finance had to manually enter the employee into PeopleSoft and wait for confirmation before payroll could allocate costs. Job changes required updates in both systems. With Workday and PeopleSoft connected, each new hire flows automatically into PeopleSoft the day after creation in Workday, cost center assignments sync in both directions, and the finance team no longer tracks employee changes across two separate platforms.

What you can do

• •Sync workers, jobs, and cost centers from Workday into PeopleSoft on a daily or weekly schedule.
• •Align Workday cost centers and organizations with PeopleSoft GL dimensions so payroll allocations land on valid accounts.
• •Handle PeopleSoft's self-hosted architecture by accepting the unique hostname and port for each customer instance.
• •Manage OAuth2 token refresh on both platforms and validate credentials at the start of every polling cycle.
• •Track processed records with a full audit trail and replay failed syncs without re-processing or duplicating data.

Questions

Which direction does data move between PeopleSoft and Workday?

The main flow is Workday into PeopleSoft. Worker records, jobs, and cost centers are read from Workday and posted into PeopleSoft to keep employee data and accounting dimensions aligned. Cost centers and organizations are mapped in both directions to ensure Workday payroll allocations match PeopleSoft GL accounts.

How does the integration handle PeopleSoft's self-hosted architecture and different authentication models?

ml-connector accepts the unique hostname and port for each customer's PeopleSoft instance since there is no shared API base URL. It supports both HTTP Basic Auth and OAuth2 depending on the customer's PeopleSoft version. Credentials are stored encrypted and validated at the start of every polling cycle.

Why does the integration need to poll instead of waiting for a webhook from either system?

Neither PeopleSoft nor Workday HCM supports native webhooks. PeopleSoft can push asynchronous messages through Integration Broker, but those require customer setup and custom parsing. Workday has no webhook system at all. Polling on a schedule tied to your payroll calendar is the most reliable and predictable approach, and ml-connector backs off and retries when Workday rate-limits with HTTP 429 responses.