Telus International’s challenge without Workday financial management
TELUS International grew rapidly through acquisition activity. Many of their regions were once standalone organizations. This resulted in several different legacy systems across the world, many of which were not connected to each other nor to their corporate parent, TELUS. Requiring a system to unify this such as Workday financial management.
“We started with separate systems for HR, finance and planning and when you have all these separate systems and you don’t have a global strategy in mind, the fallback is the good, old-fashion spreadsheet.” Mark Howitz, senior director ERP and IT for TELUS International said.
Spreadsheets were heavily utilized for the purpose of sharing data and monthly consolidation. This was suboptimal for collaboration and version control as well as limiting the ability to support full global reporting for the purposes of making business decisions.
We started with separate systems for HR, finance and planning and when you have all these separate systems and you don’t have a global strategy in mind, the fallback is the good, old-fashion spreadsheet.
Mark Howitz
Senior director ERP and IT for TELUS International
Telus International deploys Workday financial management globally
TELUS International considered several deployment partners, but ultimately opted to deploy with Strada as they felt Strada had the global expertise required for their business to be successful. They also felt that Strada had the best proposal for what was truly a global strategy for deployment and what would get the business to production in the least amount of time. With Strada, they designed, tested and deployed the following modules—
- Financial Management
- Procurement
- Supplier Accounts
- Expenses
- Customer Accounts
- Business Assets
- Banking & Settlement
- Project Work Management
- Budgets
TELUS International began with a global discovery and design, which was key to their successful deployment. Their leadership wanted to utilize global processes that the Cloud enabled, which allowed each region to function in similar ways and yet still enabled local statutory compliance. Strada walked TELUS International through all available options and provided guidance as to how best configure their Workday tenant with the most efficient workflows for their daily operations.
“You need someone with expertise to partner with you who has been there and done that to walk you through the steps,” Howitz said. “Strada did a great job walking us through our system and advising us based on what they’ve established through their experience as best practice as we set requirements and designed our processes, so that by the time we were ready to flip the switch we had a good understanding of how to use our new system effectively and efficiently.”
Strada’s consultants worked with TELUS International’s leadership to decide on a two-phase deployment with their corporate and largest regions, the United States and Canada, going live first and then the remaining regions of the Philippines, El Salvador, Guatemala, Bulgaria, Romania and the United Kingdom quickly following six months later. Their phase one project timeline for the United States and Canada followed a 39-week deployment timeline followed by a 32-week stabilization and support stage. Their phase 2 project timeline for the remaining regions followed a 25-week deployment timeline followed by a six-week stabilization and support stage.
“Now with Workday where we have our HR, finance and planning all in the same platform, a lot of our challenges have gone away. We now have a global view to all that real time data down to the transactional level on the finance side,” Howitz said. “Our planning and analysis capabilities have increased as well as now we are not just looking at the high-level numbers but have ability to look into what makes up those numbers and determining what kind of business decisions we want to make.”
During this, TELUS International also implemented additional functionality which included both Workday Adaptive Planning and Professional Services Automation for the US, Canada, Philippines, El Salvador, Guatemala, Bulgaria, Romania and the United Kingdom. At the same time, TELUS International announced the acquisition of two additional organizations in Ireland and India and leveraging their preexisting global design, were able to subsequently add these countries into to their existing Workday instance.
Strada did a great job walking us through our system and advising us based on what they’ve established through their experience as best practice as we set requirements and designed our processes, so that by the time we were ready to flip the switch we had a good understanding of how to use our new system effectively and efficiently.
Mark Howitz
Senior director ERP and IT for TELUS International
Looking forward with Strada and Workday
As these deployment phases concluded, TELUS International announced an additional acquisition of a large organization in Europe which would expand their operations to an additional 8,000 employees in 10 countries, including Germany, Spain, Turkey, Romania, Switzerland, Austria, Latvia, Poland, Bosnia, Slovakia and France. Strada was once again selected to enable their deployment for this acquired organization, in what is currently a 100 percent virtual implementation. TELUS International and Strada are working together to deploy Workday’s Core Financial Accounting, Expenses, Procurement, Business Assets, Banking & Settlement, Customer Accounts & Contracts, Supplier Accounts, Projects and Adaptive Planning across these regions within the next year.
“One of the keys to being nimble in uncertain times is being able to evaluate and determine what has worked and what needs to change. Now with our Workday Financial Management system we can make business decisions as leaders in real time versus needing to wait on end-of-year or end-of-month to view reports. It’s been an exciting transformation.”