Mergers, Acquisitions & International Expansion
In this issue of In The Loop, Stormloop shares a proven strategy to keep your Workday platform stable while designing your production environment to support mergers and acquisitions as well as international expansion. Whether your organization grows organically, through acquisition, or both, it always leads to the creation of new companies in Workday. We want to equip your team with the tools to handle these types of changes since they are so impactful to your day-to-day business operations.
Create a roadmap
Your Workday Technology Team should work with the leaders in Accounting, FP&A, Treasury, Legal, and the People Team to outline a roadmap of company initiatives that need to be worked on or completed during the next fiscal year. Break it up into quarters, have a clear start and end date for each project, then align your resources in order to execute the work.
Leave some slack in your roadmap timeline for surprises. Most of these activities will be known ahead of time; however, we all know last-minute opportunities pop up or projects get delayed. Make sure your plan is flexible enough for priorities to be moved around based on the changing needs of your business. Review your roadmap on a regular cadence so everyone stays aligned on the current and upcoming projects.
Your Workday Technology Team should be right-sized based on the needs of your organization so they can manage day-to-day production support and deliver the projects that are critical to your business. Project size, timeline, and bandwidth will all have a significant impact on the team’s ability to deliver.
Build a new legal entity playbook
Workday is an object-based, rule-based system, so it’s important to take the time to create a playbook for how to bring a new legal entity into your production tenant. This critical piece of technical documentation will be the secret to your success. It’s basically a building checklist. Outline all the parts and pieces of the system that must be taken into account when you are bringing a new company into Workday. Don’t doubt for a moment that this is a project and each one will have its own unique flavor. By having a master playbook at the ready you can copy it, customize the scope, and use it over and over again to execute these projects.
You should consider core configuration, security, integrations, and reporting when creating the playbook. Business processes can be part of it as well however, we always recommend keeping your Financials business processes as lean and streamlined as possible. The best practice is to have one global business process for each financial transaction. This ensures consistency across your organization, reduces overall system maintenance, conforms to audit requirements, and supports SOX compliance.
For Human Capital Management business processes, the best practice is to keep the process definitions standardized to make management and maintenance simple. Leverage the ‘rule-based business process definitions’ task to configure business processes to support various process flows for different functional situations. Rule-based business process definitions allow for the optimization of business process definitions to meet specific business requirements like configuring onboarding definitions for different countries as well as inactivating business process definitions without impacting any of the other definitions for that business process.
Gather requirements
Meet with your key stakeholders to gather the requirements for the project and document them in your playbook. Typically Accounting, FP&A, Treasury, Legal, and the People Team will all have buy-in.
Some examples of what can come up during the Financials requirements gathering sessions are new currencies, updates to your existing FX integration, new inbound/outbound banking integrations, BIRT layouts and translations, new GL accounts, new expense items, updates to existing custom validations across all your financial transactions, tenant level settings, and new transaction tax configuration.
For Human Capital Management, the core design sessions will cover the following: locations, security, staffing models, jobs and positions, worker data, compensation, and identification of business process definitions.
Each area of the business should have a key stakeholder involved in the project that works alongside your Workday Technology Team. A dedicated project manager should spearhead the effort, hold weekly status meetings, help control the scope creep, and provide the entire project team with a weekly status report that clearly communicates red/yellow/green status as well as any risks, issues, or blockers that may prevent the project from being delivered on time.
Everyone should stay in their respective swim lanes. The business provides the requirements, the Workday Technology Team executes the work, and the project manager provides support, visibility, and status updates. If scope creep becomes an issue and you risk missing your go-live date, take a moment to assess what is a must-have on day one in production. Everything else can be placed into a backlog and prioritized as post-go-live enhancements.
Configure and prototype
You should purchase a dedicated implementation tenant for this type of long-term development work. Your sandbox is no place for these types of projects. You need a dedicated IMPL tenant that can be refreshed from production and modified to support the new build while still having your sandbox available for troubleshooting. Now, take the requirements and start building!
Test, test, then test some more
Your end users should test everything you built and validate the results. It’s really that simple and yes, it’s a lot of work but rest assured it’s worth every minute you spend focusing on this effort. Make sure you have enough time to test, replicate key transactions, and validate your financial reporting. Double-check the resulting accounting of each test transaction and make sure there are no operational journals in error at the end of the test cycle. Again, these are not a big deal in an IMPL tenant but it’s a different story in production. These should never be the result of bad or missing configuration; that’s just noise and nobody has time for that.
For HCM it is crucial to identify the core user roles/groups that will be utilized at go-live. Test the defined security roles/groups to ensure user access is configured and provisioned as intended. Lastly, ensure users with elevated access are aware of their security assignment and responsibility at go-live.
Go or no go?
Before you move to production, have a ‘go or no go’ meeting with key stakeholders. This may sound like a waste of time; however, it’s an important ceremony to conduct before taking any new project live in Workday. It gives the business stakeholders a chance to say yes, they are ready to take on new operational work, open the period, and start transacting in this new company. It also gives the Workday Technology Team a chance to say yes, they are ready to support this new legal entity in production and they stand behind their work. This is the time to voice any concerns, issues, or blockers you may see. The group should come to a consensus and collectively agree to move forward with the go-to production date. Collaborate, don’t dictate.
Complete the production build
Building into a live production environment can be scary at times but remember if you follow your playbook and most importantly, the order of operation around the configuration tasks, everything will be just fine. Peer review the build, mark it done, and get ready for what’s next. Don’t forget to coordinate with external vendors such as banks or other systems that integrate with Workday and communicate go-live dates and first runs of integrations in production.
There are basically two ways you can complete the production build. Bring everything into Workday in a piecemeal fashion or do it all at once. We are huge fans of the big bang approach since it has resulted in successful projects for us in the past. We find doing it piece by piece only causes confusion and creates a dysfunctional relationship between the business stakeholders and the Workday Technology Team that supports the platform.
Change management
Communication across your organization is key when taking a new company live. Whether it’s expanding internationally or acquiring other companies, be sure to identify all stakeholders across each relevant business unit regarding potential changes to the Workday platform. Communicate what is changing and include why these changes are occurring and when you expect them to take place.
In both centralized and decentralized organizations, the people performing the day-to-day operational work in the system need to know about a new company. The bank accounts will need to be funded, journal entries will need to be booked, team members will need to be hired or moved, the list of operational tasks goes on and on.
Include a change management and communication plan as part of your project schedule. Determine who is responsible for sending out internal communications when the project goes live, and time the messaging with the go-live date. Be ready for feedback from the project team around the content of the communications. It’s important to keep this collaborative so that all teams are excited about their new or expanded Workday system.
Hypercare
The fun part is taking it live. One of the best projects we’ve ever led resulted in one urgent production support ticket after go-live and it had to do with someone’s security. Not only an easy fix but a huge win for the entire project team. Everyone had worked so hard to pull off a major effort and the result was nothing short of a smashing success. We don’t like using the word “perfect” but this go-live was pretty much perfect. We did such a great job of gathering requirements, building, testing, and deploying that when we went live, nothing happened. It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop from all the way across the Pacific.
The hypercare period typically lasts 45 days after go-live. It’s a commitment to your Accounting, FP&A, Treasury, Legal, and People teams that you’ll be ready to tackle any issues that may arise in production after the new legal entity goes live. If you’ve executed well, then these 45 days are going to be pretty uneventful.
Have a retro, iterate, then move on to the next one
30 days after go-live, have a retrospective. What went well? What didn’t go so well? What can we do better next time? That’s it. You don’t need to overthink it. Just spend half an hour getting feedback from the project team, update your master playbook with whatever you missed, then move on to the next project. Take your lessons learned from each and every project and apply them to the next; your team will only get better and be able to go faster as time moves on.
Your business will keep growing and expanding, so we recommend using the first project to pilot your playbook, implement these new processes, then have a retro and refine from there.
Continuous delivery is the name of the game with Workday and utilizing these tools and processes can help your team deliver on-time projects in a consistent manner and scale your platform in lockstep with your company’s growth.
What’s next?
Need help with creating your own M&A or international expansion playbook? The Services team here at Stormloop can help.
Contact us at info@stormlooptech.com to learn more.
Follow Stormloop here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/stormloop-technologies-llc
Written by: Lynea Long and Michelle Kim
Follow Lynea here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynealong/
Follow Michelle here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleyangkim/
