A Charter School Network's HR Team Connected Workday to Its Employee-Relations Case System Through an SFTP-Only Files.com Hub

A US nonprofit charter school network runs dozens of tuition-free middle and high schools serving thousands of students in one metropolitan area.

Behind those schools sits a central office running the people operations of an organization with well over a thousand employees. When the network moved its HR system of record to Workday, the HR and talent teams gained one place to see employee data. At the same time, the organization was pushing to make more of its decisions with data. That set a requirement: the employee records in Workday had to reach the employee-relations case system automatically. In three months, the Employee Relations team connected the two through Files.com without writing integration code, and it runs the flow itself.

Two Systems That Needed the Same Employee Records

The network manages employee-relations casework in Navex, and the Employee Relations team wanted each case to carry the employee record from Workday when it arrived.

Anyone working a case looked the employee up in the HRIS by hand and carried the record across, one case at a time. The team wanted the record attached before anyone opened the case, and it wanted network-wide reporting on casework to draw on one consistent source. For a network trying to run on data, the employee record had to travel with the case, on a schedule, without a person carrying it.

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

The fix sounds simple: feed the employee record from Workday into Navex on a schedule.

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. The network'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 the network 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. The network 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, so IT's requirement is a property of the site rather than a setting to check.

Workday was configured to push the employee records file to Files.com on a set schedule. 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.

The Employee Relations team configured the flow itself over roughly three months, working through credentials, sync direction, and scheduling on recurring calls with Files.com's customer success team, and had it in production.

Live in Three Months, Run From a Browser

With the flow in production, the employee record is already attached when a case comes into the network's case system. The work starts at the case, not at a lookup in a second system.

• The integration was running in production roughly three months after kickoff.
• Employee records reach cases automatically, for staff across the entire network.
• The network-wide reporting the team 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.

An Integration the HR Team Owns

The structural change is bigger than the workflow change. The network 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 didn't need custom development. It needed a meeting point.