Why Medium Enterprises Choose Workday

Today, Workday announced continued momentum with leading brands in the medium enterprise market. We’re honored that so many great customers have chosen Workday. As group vice president of medium enterprise at Workday, I wanted to take a few minutes to provide answers to some of the questions I get about how Workday serves this market.

We’ve always served this market. In fact, a substantial portion of our existing customers are medium enterprises. Workday’s true cloud model delivers the same levels of service and the same positive business outcomes to all of our customers, whether they have several hundred local employees, or hundreds of thousands of workers across the globe.

There is often a combination of factors that prompt medium enterprises to make a change. They’re likely looking for a proven enterprise system to support them in their growth, be it organic, through merger and acquisition, or preparing for a public offering of stock. They may be struggling with a large number of obsolete applications, and want to move to a single system in the cloud for finance, HR, and payroll that offers insights into their business and improves operational efficiency. They may be seeking more flexibility and speed as they respond to change, such as new regulations. One example of that is ASC 606, the new revenue recognition standard that comes into effect next year.

We believe we offer medium enterprises an exceptional alternative to our competitors in three key elements of success: capabilities, value, and ownership. Let’s take a look:

Capabilities: Workday executes transactions, but we go beyond that—we capture information at the point of action, with business processes built in. Our competitors’ legacy systems were designed for data entry after the fact, following a manual workflow. Workday’s object technology allows for the representation of real-world entities such as workers, benefits, budgets, and organizations without the technical complexity and rigidity associated with legacy vendors’ relational database architectures. This allows Workday to capture both the content and context of everyday business events and deliver financial, operational, and management reporting from the same set of data in real time. Legacy systems were designed to report the past. Workday was designed to report the past, monitor and control the present, and best prepare for the future.

Value: We put tremendous focus on creating a consumer-like experience and developing for mobile devices. But it goes beyond that. Legacy systems were designed for “back office” administrators. Workday was designed to provide value at the front lines of business, while automatically handling administrative and compliance requirements. Every employee in an organization can use Workday because it is easy to use and a valuable productivity tool.

Ownership: We believe our service levels are superior to the competition, and all customers, no matter their size, enjoy the same level of service. Our approach is clearly working, because our customers have once again given us a 97 percent customer satisfaction rating. All of our customers become part of an exceptional community—for example, they participate in Workday Community, a private online community where customers, partners, and Workday employees collaborate and share best practices. They also enjoy our continuous development approach, with the opportunity to choose new features and functionality as they become available. Customers benefit from an agile and scalable technology foundation that helps them rapidly adjust to changing requirements and business growth, without the need for an army of outside consultants or added resources. And finally, our medium enterprise customers are able to deploy quickly, with built-in control processes and always-on auditing to help proactively protect them against risk and fraud.

We often talk about the Workday Power of One, and deployment is another area where it shines. Since every customer is on the same codeline, we are able to leverage deployment artifacts (things like security models, business processes, and reports) from previous customer deployments. These artifacts have been curated from hundreds of medium enterprise customers, and are leveraged for new customers. Every new engagement starts with a relevant preconfigured tenant, which lowers risk and costs as the customer sees its people, plans, and reporting structures at the beginning of the project. Workday Launch takes the approach to the next level by providing preconfigured packages for a fixed fee and time-to-production of four to six months.

Companies such as Bill Gosling Outsourcing, CustomInk, Ensono, and Patagonia, as mentioned in today’s news release, have chosen Workday to streamline processes, increase productivity, and reduce risk across their finance, HR, and payroll operations. With Workday, medium enterprises receive predictable timelines and flexible technology to meet their current objectives, drive business growth, and adapt to change as market conditions evolve.

We have great traction in this space, with many live and happy medium enterprise customers who are seeing measurable results. But we’re just getting started, and I see a huge opportunity ahead.