Business expansion is an exciting endeavor, but it doesn’t come without certain key challenges. Whether your organization is pursuing an acquisition or you are planning to grow organically through increased revenue, adding more personnel, introducing new products or service lines, or expanding to new regions, you may face a variety of operational challenges.
For instance, during periods of organic growth, your finance department may become busy with an uptick in transactional volume, adjustments to existing processes related to starting new lines of business, creating new processes for new revenue streams, budgeting and forecasting for increased headcount, and more. In order to avoid over-stressing the department, you’ll need to plan to ensure you have the dedicated resources and personnel necessary to absorb any new workstreams.
Likewise, your HR department must similarly prepare to support new growth. It helps to ask questions such as:
- Do we have the personnel and infrastructure to hire at the desired rate?
- If new products are introduced, are we equipped with the appropriate employees to sell them?
- How will new product orders be fulfilled?
While mergers and acquisitions present their own unique challenges with respect to a company’s growth, similar questions apply. Leading up to and following the transaction, your organization should be evaluating what your pain points are, how to leverage the strengths of each organization, where synergies exist, and determining what needs to occur in order to successfully integrate all business processes across the combined company.
In this Workday Configuration Guide, we’ll explain how Workday is well-suited to support a growing organization, the benefits of the Workday Launch method, and steps you can take to configure Workday to best support your particular business needs.
How Does Workday Support Growth?
As Workday themselves note, their software “is designed to fuel your acceleration in a changing world.” Their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution aims to enable users to move quickly and easily adapt their solution — all so businesses have the flexibility to adjust their processes as they expand.
Workday uses a Foundation Data Model (FDM), a multi-dimensional data structure that serves as the backbone for transaction processing and reporting. The FDM is designed to allow you to easily group users and tag transactions within different business units or business lines. The reporting structure is flexible and dynamic, allowing you to quickly add categories and modify changes to your organizational structure. In this way, Workday makes it easy to have the appropriate core elements of your business in place — and to easily update structures as needed.
What is Workday’s Launch Deployment Methodology?
We like to think of Workday’s Launch methodology as a “crawl, walk, run” approach to implementing Workday for new customers. Moving from a legacy system with limitations to the dynamic, highly configurable world of Workday may seem overwhelming, but the Launch methodology is designed to ease the transition.
The Launch approach allows you to quickly move from your current platform to Workday. You’ll go live on Workday with the core components needed to support your business and gain additional functionality as you move forward by tailoring the solution to your unique needs and roadmapping follow-on deployments as needed.
This method asks the customer to identify critical business processes that need refinement, then provides a fast-track to get there. It’s a pre-configured approach based on best practices that allows you to deploy Workday while minimizing risk and disruption to your business.
Workday Configuration vs. Customization — And the Benefit of Workday Community
One of the benefits of Workday is that every customer is on the same software version, but you can also tailor your configuration to specific needs and goals.
This means that you have access to resources like Workday Community, which provides a password-protected forum to ask peers and experts questions related to anything Workday, while also benefiting from the ability to configure your setup to be unique to your business.
Steps for Configuring Workday to Support Business Growth
It’s our belief that there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach when it comes to preparing for a Workday deployment. Different businesses operating in different industries and geographical locations will merit unique attention. A step-by-step approach will differ depending on these factors and many more, but a great first step is to engage a Workday Services Partner as early in the process as possible.
A partner will advise you on an appropriate deployment roadmap given your business needs, strategy, and priorities, and provide the extra-level support you need for a smooth and seamless transition. They can also help with knowledge transfer and initial enhancements within the system, in addition to training IT departments on how to support certain aspects of the Workday system.
TopBloc specializes in alleviating the resource-intensive requirements inherent in a company’s digital transformation. We pride ourselves on our ability to reduce resourcing requirements, enabling clients to remain focused on their business while they gain value from their new Workday platform. From SmartLoader, which automates menial data transformation processes, to our specialized SmartBundles, which pre-configure best-practice processes for operations in specific countries, TopBloc is continually innovating how to deploy Workday with our tools and technology.
Choosing a Workday Services Partner that fits your needs is therefore the most important first step to any Workday deployment. (We also believe you should consider the long term and determine if you believe your organization would benefit from continued support. Many Workday Services Partners provide application management services post-launch to assist your team with day-to-day Workday management. At TopBloc, our Help Desk does exactly that.)
Support Business Growth by Partnering With TopBloc
TopBloc provides Workday deployment services and flexible, on-demand Workday support. Whether you’re ready to deploy Workday or you’re looking for strategic support or continuing technical and functional support, we have the experience and knowledge you can count on.
Contact us today if you have any questions or would like more information about our services.
