After a Year of Trying, Alliance’s HR Team Put Its Workday–Navex Integration Live in Three Months With Files.com

Alliance College-Ready Public Schools is L.A. County's largest nonprofit public charter school network: 25 tuition-free middle and high schools serving nearly 13,000 students from Los Angeles' Latine, Black, and immigrant communities. The network is known nationally for its outcomes. Most of its incoming sixth-graders test four grades behind, and 97 percent of its seniors are accepted to college.

Behind those schools sits a central office running the people operations of an organization with roughly 1,550 employees. When Alliance moved its HR system of record to Workday, the HR and talent teams gained access and transparency into employee data they had never had in one place. At the same time, the organization was pushing to make more of its decisions with data. That combination exposed a gap: employee data lived in Workday, while employee-relations casework in Navex lacked demographic context. In three months, the Employee Relations team connected them through Files.com without writing integration code, making network-wide demographic reporting on workplace cases possible.

Ethics Cases With No Demographic Data Attached

Alliance tracks ethics complaints, misconduct cases, and employee-relations matters in Navex EthicsPoint. Cases arrived there with no demographic attributes at all: no employee numbers, no gender, nothing that tied a case to a population of employees.

The cost landed on the people doing the analysis. Anyone working a case had to leave the complaint system, look the employee up in the HRIS by hand, and carry the attributes back, one case at a time. The larger cost was what the organization could not do at all: roll up complaint trends by demographic group across the network, and see which employee populations its policies most needed to support. For a network trying to run on data, its employee-relations data was structurally cut off from the employees it described.

Two SaaS Platforms, No Direct Connection, and an SFTP-Only Rule

The fix sounds simple: feed Workday's demographic data into Navex. In practice, the team had been trying to get that integration built for over a year.

Neither platform connects to the other directly. Each end had its own credential, scheduling, and file-format requirements, and an implementation vendor sat in the middle of the Workday side. Alliance's IT organization added a hard security constraint: SFTP could be allowed, and every other protocol had to be blocked. And the team that needed the data was a small Employee Relations group inside HR, not an engineering organization that could write and maintain custom integration code.

What Alliance needed was a meeting point. Something both platforms could reach over SFTP on their own schedules. Something that enforced the protocol restriction as a property of the system rather than a line in a policy. And something the Employee Relations team could configure and run itself, from a browser. Alliance selected Files.com to be that meeting point.

A Locked-Down SFTP Hub Between Workday and Navex

Files.com became the neutral hub between the two platforms, with the security rule built into the site itself.

The site was configured to permit SFTP and block every other protocol at the platform level. IT's requirement was not a configuration someone had to remember to check; it was the only way in or out.

Workday was configured to push the personnel file to Files.com weekly. Files.com Automations forwarded it to Navex as soon as it arrived and archived a timestamped copy. Navex retrieved the file over SFTP with SSH key authentication from a dedicated read-only folder and returned a processed report, giving the vendor access to the personnel file and nothing else.

The Employee Relations team configured the flow itself between November 2024 and February 2025, working through credentials, sync direction, and scheduling on recurring calls with Files.com's customer success team, and had it in production by February.

Live in Three Months, After a Year of Trying

With the flow in production, demographic context is already attached when a complaint comes into Alliance's case system. The analysis starts at the analysis, not at a lookup in a second system.

• An integration the team had pursued for over a year was running in production roughly three months after kickoff.
• Demographic attributes now reach complaint and misconduct cases automatically across staff records for the entire network.
• The network-wide reporting Alliance wanted can now draw on an automated feed instead of a manual data-alignment exercise.

There is a compounding result underneath the immediate one. The integration is owned and operated day to day by the Employee Relations team. Keeping it running is not a standing engineering project, and changing a schedule or a folder does not require a developer.

“Being able to have clear transparency and visibility into the demographics that are impacted would certainly help us in creating a bigger picture of those who are impacted by these issues.”

An Integration the HR Team Owns

The structural change is bigger than the workflow change. Alliance connected two SaaS platforms that have no native integration, without writing code on either end. Files.com gave both systems a governed place to meet: each speaks SFTP to it on its own schedule, the platform enforces the security rule IT set, and the team that owns the data runs the whole exchange from a browser. The integration Alliance couldn't get built in a year didn't need custom development. It needed a meeting point.