Workday’s Data Change on Demand (DCOD) is the REST API at the heart of Global Payroll Connect (GPC), Workday’s certified partner program for connecting to third-party payroll providers worldwide. DCOD replaced the older batch-based PECI connector with a modern, on-demand pull model. Instead of waiting for scheduled nightly or weekly file exports, third-party payroll systems use DCOD to request exactly the data they need, when they need it, in compact JSON format.
DCOD works alongside four other GPC connectors: External Payroll Results (ExPR) for pushing payroll results back into Workday, External Payroll Documents (ExPD) for payslips and tax documents, Additional Payroll Data (APD) for country-specific fields not natively stored in Workday, and Global Payroll Hub (GPH) for centralized payroll status visibility. Together, these form the bidirectional integration framework between Workday HCM and any payroll provider.
Connecting to the DCOD API itself is a solved problem. The hard part is downstream: mapping the data that DCOD delivers into the format each local payroll provider expects, for each country, with jurisdiction-specific compensation rules applied. A DCOD data pull for Germany contains different compensation components, statutory deductions, and field structures than one for Brazil. Each country-provider combination requires its own mapping logic.
datascalehr handles this translation layer. The platform connects to Workday’s GPC stack (including DCOD) once and maps data to any of 1,000+ downstream target systems across 150+ countries. KMod™ has processed 7,000+ schemas including deep coverage of Workday’s data structures. When a new country’s payroll provider is added, KMod predicts the correct mappings based on patterns from previous Workday deployments.
For Workday administrators, this means adding a new country does not require a new DCOD integration project or a new systems integrator engagement. datascalehr handles the transformation from Workday’s GPC output to any local provider’s input format, and the reverse flow back through ExPR. There are approximately 7,000 Workday customers who need payroll connectivity, and datascalehr is building a repeatable channel to serve this installed base.