ISU Find Suppliers Report 

It is recommended that the ISU Find Suppliers report be used to search for suppliers in Workday. The report allows for searching by supplier name or Tax ID, in addition to other fields. The search can also be limited to active suppliers.  

  Searching Tips

Searching for suppliers in Workday can be challenging.  The following tips should be utilized: 

  • Less is MORE! – When searching by supplier name, the less you search for, the more returns you get.  Don’t search for the entire supplier name.  Choose part of the name, especially if part of the name is somewhat unique or uncommon. 
  • Remember, migrated suppliers may have abbreviations or truncation applied to their name 
  • Be willing to do more than one search 

  Searching by Supplier Name 

New suppliers going into Workday today have very few naming conventions applied (see KBA: Supplier Naming Conventions in Workday), and that’s because Workday allows plenty of characters for longer supplier names, but that wasn’t true in the legacy supplier systems. Standard abbreviations were used in ADIN, but other sources abbreviated or truncated without any rules.  The ADIN system also adopted IRS naming conventions. 

Examples of standard abbreviations include: 

  • UNIV for University 
  • INTL for International 
  • ASSN for Association 
  • SRVCS for Services 
  • Examples of IRS naming conventions: 
  • No leading “The” allowed in supplier names 
  • No punctuation allowed in supplier names 
  • The word “AND” is replaced with the ampersand (&) 
     

   Searching by Tax ID 

When searching by Tax ID it is important to remember that not all suppliers in Workday will have one. 

  • Suppliers that don’t have a Tax ID include: 
  • Foreign – most foreign suppliers don’t have US Tax IDs 
  • Children – child suppliers in a supplier hierarchy relationship will not have a Tax ID (only Parents have Tax IDs) 
  • “Incomplete” – some suppliers were allowed to migrate into Workday without Tax IDs 
  • Special Exceptions – there are some suppliers that aren’t required to have a Tax ID, for example state treasurers 

  • Supplier Data Background

    Suppliers were brought into WD from multiple sources/databases: 

    • ADIN (Procurement) 
    • FAMIS(FP&M) 
    • KFS (Accounts Payable) – the non-PO suppliers 
    • Ames Lab 
    • Library 
    • Bookstore

    The suppliers in the KFS, Library, Bookstore, and Ames Lab databases were set up solely for making payments to suppliers, so these suppliers typically don’t have much more than a remittance address.  Suppliers from Procurement and FPM tend to be more robust because we issue POs & SCNs to them in addition to payments, so they will have order addresses, contact information, supplier groups, special classifications, and a remittance address. 

    All suppliers from these sources were imported into Workday without eliminating duplicates.  Instead, they identified duplicate suppliers by Tax ID and then linked them as Parent and Child/Children using the supplier hierarchy (see KBA: Understanding Supplier Hierarchy).  In addition, each source used its own rules regarding supplier names.  The ADIN supplier database, for example, applied standardized abbreviations and IRS naming conventions, whereas other sources used non-standard abbreviations and/or truncation.