Developing a Relationship with Your Workday AMS Partner
Many Workday customers are choosing to outsource the management of their Workday tenants to Application Managed Services (AMS) vendors. There are many options available for post-production support and not all post-production vendors are Workday certified, but does that matter? After all, you should rightfully expect any vendor with whom you have a contract to fix any tickets you submit. And that’s it, right?
Not really.
Workday is not a static product; your tenants are not built to remain stagnant. Updates occur often and with substantial impact to the functionality of existing and new configurations. Certified partners are guaranteed to employ consultants who are always trained on the latest and greatest that Workday has to offer. Certified not only means that Workday has given their seal of approval, but that you can have peace of mind that the individuals who make up your consulting team are by definition more informed than a non-certified consultant. So to get the most of your investment in your Workday subscription, you should work with a Workday certified partner. This, in turn, begs the question of whether the level of service can vary significantly from partner to partner.
The short answer is yes, absolutely it does.
Forming the Right AMS Partnership
There are several common starting points – during the go live phase to ensure expert guidance during stabilization and future-state strategizing; when considering optimizing the current production environment; or when the Workday administrator team is stretched thin and you need an expert consultant to become an extension of your team.
Of course, budget will be a deciding factor in any evaluation process, but caveat emptor! Using budget alone as the deciding factor often results in missed pieces that are critical to the success of the management of your Workday tenant.
Other components you should evaluate when speaking with potential AMS partners:
Do They Offer Named or Pooled Resources?
This is important when it comes to knowing who will be managing your tenants and whether they can holistically fix any issues, or if it’ll be a patch and move on, possibly creating negative downstream impacts.
Do They Offer Integration Warranties?
Integrations are critical to the success of your Workday subscription, but if one should break, especially the more complex studio integrations, then you can experience business continuity impacts. Every AMS partner has to offer integrations support so be sure to understand their integrations experience and guarantees.
How Do They Support Workday’s Annual Upgrades?
R1 and R2 can bring opportunities for optimization and process enhancements. And it can bring bandwidth challenges, complicated downstream impacts, and user interface changes. Be sure you know whether your AMS partner can, let alone will, consult with you to advise which are the most important optimizations and how those mesh into your roadmap, and how these updates will impact your hours of support.
How Are Tickets Prioritized?
Every AMS vendor should be expected to respond in a timely manner, but a true services partner will want to make sure that their response matches your need. For example, at ERPA every support ticket logged asks clients to specify whether they just want us to fix it, should we fix it and show you the work, or should we fix it and teach you how we fixed it. This ensures we’re setting our clients up for future success, either by protecting their time or empowering them to take on solutions internally.
ERPA is Here to Help
Essentially what it all comes down to is the relationship. Do you feel valued by your AMS partner, and not just as a potential revenue stream? Does your AMS partner understand your business, can it effectively weigh business critical decisions against long-terms nice-to-haves, and is it in a position to prioritize your support work, or are they just churning through tickets with no thoughts to the downstream business impacts?
If you’re interested in working with an AMS partner who is also a consultant, someone who wants to ensure your Workday subscription is managed in support of your long-term goals, reach out to us today. We’d love to speak with you.
