How a Workday Consultant Breathes New Life into an Ecosystem
Most companies that want to unlock the full power of Workday turn to a Workday consultant who can walk them through the details. These professionals must be certified by Workday—a certification that isn’t easily earned—and must undergo extensive training on the system. Companies around the world trust Workday as their go-to platform for business process administration across human capital management, financial management, and more.
Workday’s tools provide a range of features and applications for HR and finance and it has developed a loyal fan base of companies (and users) that love its capabilities. In many ways, going live with Workday is only the beginning of a business’s digital transformation. HR and finance functions can be managed strategically to ensure that users get the full range of value-adding options available in Workday. The caveat here is that users need deep insight into the Workday ecosystem to bring these benefits to life.
For many businesses, this insight is hard to come by through natural use. By committing themselves to Workday optimization, consultants can turn an otherwise standard Workday implementation into a strategic, competitive advantage. Below, we review a few of the biggest ways that a Workday consultant can revitalize your ecosystem and help you get more value out of your investment.
Implementation and Life After Launch
Workday’s deployment methodologies— Workday Launch and the streamlined Workday Launch Express—were built to help clients go live at speed. These methods leverage common artifacts from past deployments and preconfigured services to get users online quickly, and they offer an effective and low-risk way to deploy the Workday ecosystem.
While Workday Launch’s built-in tools do make it easy to set the system up, users may find that the standard configurations are limited in what they can provide. In our experience, companies across the board benefit from additional, company-specific optimizations that help bring out the best of what Workday has to offer.
Workday’s standard launch service is a valuable implementation tool, but companies should view it as only the foundation for ongoing improvement rather than the final product. There’s plenty of value to be found in Workday optimizations, provided companies have the experience and know-how to realize these improvements.
Workday Managed Service Providers (MSPs) like ERPA specialize in Workday optimizations, and they help users get the maximum value out of their systems. As a certified Workday consultant, ERPA uplevels Workday tenants with a suite of Life After Launch services:
- Stabilization support
- Payroll Bridge Support
- Issue resolution training
- SOP governance
- Integrations review
- And more
These services unlock some of the most sought-after features and desired functions from past businesses that have undergone a Workday deployment. A Workday consultant will work with a business to determine what gaps may exist and how to capitalize on those opportunities.
Consulting and Change Management
It’s commonly said that a year of consulting is comparable to three years in the business world. A consultant sees so many different clients and different problems that expertise comes as a matter of course. This holds particularly true for technical ecosystems like Workday and the myriad ways it can be customized to different company profiles.
As Workday consultants are architects of change management, consultants in this space will learn about a company’s needs, available resources, and challenges—all weighed against lessons learned from past experiences with similar businesses. Through this experience, they generate technical roadmaps for improvement, goal prioritization, and more to help businesses maximize their Workday investment.
At its most basic, a certified Workday consultant can bring new eyes to a tenant and demonstrate an entirely new way to manage key business processes.
Qualities to Look for in a Workday Consultant
How does a company determine which consultants might be a good fit?
Top areas to consider should be the consultant’s technical capabilities and philosophy. Common areas of technical focus may include:
- Assessments into business processes
- Application modernization solutions
- Strategies to manage and catalog data
- Develop named resources that know your tenant
- Integrate reporting & analytics for better visibility
While many MSPs can provide consultative services, the best results come from consultants who prioritize an educational approach in their business philosophy. Consultants should prioritize knowledge transfer to internal teams and establish consistent, repeatable practices that allow companies to scale efficiently, even after the partnership is over.
Think of knowledge transfer as an essential complement to technical platform consulting, like two wings of an airplane. Neither supersedes the other; the two work in tandem to achieve a result. In our view, these two elements are indispensable to effective consulting, and any company seeking MSP support should make them a priority.
Get the Most Value Out with an ERPA Workday Consultant
Standard Workday implementations are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Workday offers its users. But to unlock this value, companies need a partner who can show them the way.
At ERPA, our Workday Team members serve as thought leaders in different functional areas through Workday conference presentations, marketing activities, and by serving as Product Leads in Workday’s partner program.
Combined with a collective Workday Practice of over 50,000 hours and certification across the entire Workday platform, our consultants are second to none in Workday mastery.
If you’re looking to get more value out of Workday, contact ERPA for an assessment. Our consultants will help you reap the benefits of Workday optimization and minimize stress on your internal teams.
