Importance of adding an outside Workday® consultant to your team

Today, six of the Fortune 10 companies use Workday® Human Capital Management (HCM) system. This is not a mean feat by any measure. The Workday® website announces that the world's leading companies trust Workday® as their enterprise cloud suite, supporting breakthrough results in financial management, human capital management, and planning across a wide range of challenges and industries. With thousands of companies as customers, Workday® is emerging as the standard cloud solution for HR and accounting.

In the 'Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises, 2020' report, published in June 2020 by Gartner, Workday® maintained its coveted position as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

One of the reasons for its leadership position has been Workday®'s reference customer scores for the availability of third-party consulting resources, ease of deployment, and ease of integration, placing it in the top quartile of vendors evaluated. Additionally, reference customers cited strong improvement in Workday® professional services related to their financial management deployments.

The Workday® implementation process typically follows the 5 step methodology: Planning, Architecture and Build, Configuration & Prototype, (Re-configuration, if applicable), Testing, and Final Deployment. An independent outside Workday® consultant can add tremendous value almost at any stage of the implementation process.

Here are a few scenarios where the third-party consulting resources will be of help as your internal team goes about maximizing the value of your Workday® investment.

Pay-as-you-go IT support

Workday® is a tool for business transformation. Once the implementation is over, your IT department needs to triage with business stakeholders to ensure continuous planning in sync with long-term business goals, maximum operational efficiency, and agility strategies in a dynamic environment. At the same time, the post-implementation phase is crucial in its own way and requires 24/7 support.

An outside consultant can be of immense help, and a pay-as-you-go support model can help to shave off overheads significantly. Whether remote or on-site, when required, a pay-as-you-go model can be ideal for dealing with less frequent IT support requirements, freeing up time for your internal team to other pressing matters. Needles to say, in addition to cost savings, you can also have access to top talent with third-party support resources.

Workday® Advisory Services

Your Workday® implementation will be the single system for HR, Finance, and Payroll, ready to enable business transformation. However, equally strong expertise has to work to make your system deliver real-time business insights driving expected business transformation. The business benefits from your Workday® system will multiply manifold with the right business advisory services partner by your side. Standing at the intersection of people, process, and technology, your advisory partner can help usher in the necessary efficiency, cost, and productivity benefits that come with Workday®.

Testing Implementation

In the typical 5-step implementation methodology outlined above, the testing phase is a complex and long one requiring a comprehensive deployment plan. Some of the key activities here can provide costly for medium-sized businesses to run, hiring many internal technical resources.

There would be a need for multiple testing scenarios run by professionals with strong technical skills, an understanding of use-cases, and more. Again, testing scripts and testing automation tools can be expensive for some organizations. A third-party testing partner can deploy the right talent and be of much value during this phase.

Post Implementation Support

In addition, to necessary IT support in the Workday® post-implementation phase, there is a multitude of ongoing activities that can be best taken care of by an outside consultant. Workday® typically announces two major updates in a year. When such updates occur just after launch or even during the launch, there could be significant dips in your metrics. While a go-live is just the beginning of organizational transformation, realizing true results depends on efficiently taking care of the post-implementation change management processes.

The process of applying updates, taking care of gaps in design after go-live, ensuring compliance with complexities ranging from translation to multiple accounting standards or currencies, and providing real-time analysis user-friendly interface, etc., can all be handled effectively with the unique skill sets that a team of outside Workday® consultants brings to the table.

Analytics and Reporting

One of the most significant benefits of working with a team of third-party consultants for Workday® implementation is the wealth of experience that comes in from professionals who possess experience connecting dozens of different platforms, databases, custom legacy software, HRIS, Financial, and 3rd party systems to Workday®®. This means that your IT team can skip the learning curves or even better learn from the experts. even as the experts seamlessly integrate systems and enable best-in-class analytics and reporting to enable business insights and process improvements.

How Can Assist Now Help?

The advantages of Workday® outsourcing highly outweigh other considerations. Over the years, our team members have honed their talent, living through design, development, deployment, and maintenance of highly complex Workday® HCM and Financial Management systems. We provide Workday® assistance to configure solutions for your business keeping in mind optimum cost, change management, and impact parameters. You will feel comfortable that you're making the best decisions with comprehensive data and contextual insight.

Assist Now can help you with

• Managed Services
• Pay-As-You-Go
• Evolution
• Integrations
• Reports and Analytics
• Financial Management & HCM

Most importantly, we will provide you the most affordable solutions that you can possibly imagine. Call us today or schedule a consultation with Assist Now to know more.

But anyone can say they offer the best price or service, right? At AssistNow, we live it every day with our customers. We give our customers peace of mind and satisfaction with world-class service and support by harnessing emerging tools and technologies.