Check for empty table from within workflow

Folks,
Any pointers or ideas will be highly appreciated. Here my issue:

After deployment of all custom modules, there is a module by the name settings. I have written a workflow that populates all fields within the settings module.
Tricky part is the workflow will not trigger since i cant frame a condition where an empty table is checked and then the workflow is run. I need to run this workflow only once to see that settings are all in place.

Any pointers ?