Make finance transformation work.
Finance has changed.
Today, organisations require finance to support strategic decision making. That means there is an increased need for finance to transform their function; shifting resources from transaction processing and control to being a better business partner–all at a lower cost.
Why is this so challenging?
Technology originally designed to support accounting was never designed to support finance as a business partner.
It’s time. Make finance transformation work. Rethink the technology.
When we deployed Workday, we knew to a certain degree, it would be transformational. What we didn't expect was the level of analytical productivity that existed at the operations level. The operations team started to become more and more engaged on the analytics side. Combined with finance, they could do a much better job in predicting and understanding their business.
Reduce the burden of transaction processing.
On average, transaction processing takes up more than half of all finance resources. As a result, it is one of the major barriers to finance transformation.
If finance is to provide contextual data to support decision making, and realise its vision of becoming a more strategic partner–then things need to change.
It’s time to rethink the technology. Reduce the burden of transaction processing and set up your function for success.
The conversation used to be about transactions. Is that transaction entered in the system? Is that transaction complete in the system? Now, we can focus on reporting and analytics. Workday has enabled us to take a more strategic look at why things are happening and the underlying reasons.
Get the tools to support proper governance.
It’s critical for any finance team to get internal control and governance right. The emergence of BASEL II, Sarbanes-Oxley, Solvency II and other recent regulatory and governance schemes has complicated this.
Existing legacy software vendors have had to progressively bolt on aftermarket controls to keep up. Which makes ensuring compliance increasingly time-consuming and detracts from finance’s ability to transform into a true business partner.
It’s time to rethink the technology. Reinforce your audit and control.
This is huge for us from a financial perspective, because we’re all about accountability. And the accountability within the Workday system is phenomenal.
Become a partner with the business.
The ultimate goal of finance transformation is to create partnerships which impact business outcomes.
In the past, finance could only produce information for the few. Today financial information is being used in the day-to-day running of the whole business–not just in the boardroom.
Finance needs easy access to the right data across a rapidly evolving business.
It’s time to rethink the technology. Reinvigorate your partnership with the business.
Our financial analyst time—in terms of preparation of data versus analysis—has gone from 70/30 to 30/70. Now we’re only spending about 30 percent of our time producing financial information, with the rest now spent on analysis, allowing us to use data to drive future business decisions.
Reimagine finance in the cloud.
Delivering true business partnership while decreasing cost is the ultimate prize of finance transformation.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery alone, significantly reduces software-operating cost.
The cloud can also better utilise resources by reallocating as much as 40% of technical resources to revenue impacting projects.
Additionally, in the past, keeping up with changes in the business could take months and cost thousands to implement. Today, finance leaders expect these changes to be implemented within hours.
To significantly reduce costs and increase flexibility, you have to completely rethink the technology that supports finance.
It’s time to rethink the technology. Reimagine your finance in the cloud.
Workday challenged our IT organization to think differently. Workday lets us change how we engage with the business, with a focus on business processes and core business requirements instead of focusing on servers and hardware and code. That’s a key differentiator for us—now we can have real conversations with the CFO or CEO or other leaders.