Anybody who has their own home or apartment is familiar with “Spring Cleaning”. Going through and doing a deep clean and purge of things you no longer need or use. The same should be true of your Workday platform.
As part of their standard update cycle, Workday has 2 main releases per calendar year as well as some other releases between those updates. Many customers – for a variety of reasons – may defer on activating new features that are considered optional as part of the standard updates.
If organizations repeatedly ignore or defer taking advantage of those enhancements, they could be missing optimization opportunities that add value in the form of financial improvement, useability improvement or streamlined processing.
To play catch up on these opportunities – or to at least get an idea of what you may be missing – an optimization assessment is a simple first step.
There are a number of common clues that it may be time to consider an optimization assessment for your organization:
- Frustration from users. Are users having difficulty doing their jobs? Are workflows flowing efficiently and is there value add at each step of the Business Process?
- Reporting is lacking. Are you able to make timely business decisions with the reports and dashboards you have? Do your users ask you for additional details or data in order to run the business? Are you using dashboards?
- Too many manual workarounds. Are your users spending a lot of time with offline processes, using spreadsheets or other tools to achieve the desired results to complete a transaction or get the data they need to make decisions?
- External impacts. Are customers complaining about inaccurate billing? Suppliers want more details on their payment vouchers? Are you able to close on time and report out financial information in a timely and efficient manner?
- Initial ROI objective not achieved or even measured. Many organizations create a business case for their Workday deployment and go through detailed analysis on potential cost savings and top line improvement. Have you reviewed your actual results compared to the plan? What else can you do to meet or even accelerate your initial goals?
- You haven’t implemented any new features since go-live. After going live, have you reviewed new features that have been added in subsequent releases? Do you have a process in place to review each update and assess if it could be used or fixes a known issue?
If you are considering an optimization assessment for your Workday platform, there are few things you can do to get started:
- Bring subject matter experts from each area together to discuss pain points and to document their wish lists for enhancements.
- Work with your internal support group or an experienced consultancy to do a comprehensive review of past releases with an eye toward identifying features or updates not yet being utilized.
- Put together a prioritization list, plan and budget to implement identified features to roll-out.
- Long-term, you can implement a governance process to review new releases and assess impacts to the organization and then implement on your schedule.
There is always cost and effort to do your Spring Cleaning (buying cleaning supplies, moving things, throwing things out etc.…) but when you are done you will feel great and be ready for month-end close – er Summer 😊. And remember, you don’t have to wait until Spring to do it…
Makes so much sense. It's like hitting a snooze button on your computer updates until you realize things aren't working the way they should.