With Workday Financials, adopting best practice is a must

A head of transformation decided to replace its global ERP system with Workday. Her rationale was that Workday would foster a completely new way of working where users would be exposed to a modern web interface and be at the frontier of the latest technology by taking advantage of its frequent release updates over the cloud.

The client had used a popular legacy on-premise ERP but the evolution of this application through staff changes and acquisitions had created differences on how the ERP was used within the organisation. In many instances, it was heavily supported by Excel where employees would extract raw data and apply her own custom formulas, pivot tables and hard coding to get the required outputs. When she left, it left an untraceable method on how to replicate the process to produce the same report.

Just before the deployment, the client was also in the middle of a transition of its transactional finance activities to migrate general ledger, accounts payable and cash accounting functions from onshore teams to a nearshore shared service centre. However, the legacy ERP was not fit to support this change as the shared service migration required standardised processes. The variations of workflows amongst countries made lifting and shifting activities to a shared service centre impossible to achieve. Hence, Workday was swiftly selected as the answer to these hurdles.

We faced the realisation that migrating to Workday wasn’t something we could easily lift from the legacy application and shift to Workday without serious work. Due to the multiple environments in the legacy architecture, there were circumstances that couldn’t continue with Workday such as:

• Suppliers from different environments that would represent duplicates in a single tenant

• No clear roles or responsibilities on who was permitted to do what

• Different chart of accounts across countries and business units

• Different workflows and approvals across countries for the same process

What we learned

While it was technically possible to replicate the features the client had in the legacy ERP, doing so would have defeated the purpose of using Workday as its main objective was to standardise data and processes to generate a more efficient finance function.

Critical to deploying Workday and fulfilling this objective was doing the following:

• Defining a global chart of accounts so that finance data was categorised consistently across the organisation

• Adopting standard workflows across its business process so that the shared service centre had a single way of working irrespective of the country they served

• Clarifying roles and responsibilities that forced onshore finance to move transactional tasks to the shared service centre. This gave full control to the shared service teams to initiate tasks and enabled a change to onshore finance teams to focus more on reviewing financial numbers and making decisions on that data rather than coding data correctly

• Utilising self-service where possible. The growing responsibility of the shared service team meant that the stakeholders in each country were responsible for their own activities such as expense claims and supplier maintenance

• Maximising automation and integrations to further reduce variations of how transactions are coded to further standardise data and maximise efficiencies

Surprisingly, the most significant challenge was not the technical or functional requirements that were needed by the business to fulfil its finance responsibilities with Workday. Instead, it was the long-held attitudes of doing things in the past and the belief that this was the right and only way of doing things. Deploying Workday highlighted not only new ways of working but that different regions and units in the same business had always done things differently but the prevalence of different environments obscured this reality.

Once the mindset shifted, many users saw Workday in a light that had never been seen towards an ERP system. Instead of concern and hesitation, the users were drawn to the friendly user interface and the focus on the important things such as reporting and analytics rather than data extraction and postings. As the deployment cycle was short, many of the additional features that further automated finance tasks such as auto-matching of reconciliations and allocations were on the agenda for further improvements and many countries were enthused with the prospect of extracting further efficiencies and getting more out of Workday Financials in the near future.

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