We’re delighted to announce that Workday has been recognized as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large, and Global Enterprises based on our completeness of vision and ability to execute1.
This is the fifth consecutive year Gartner has named Workday a Leader in this category, which we believe further solidifies our position as a trusted global partner for the office of finance. We believe the key to our Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader recognition has been the amazing success of our 1,000-plus customers and their ability to plan, execute, and analyze in a single system while working remotely in uncertain times.
Delivering on Workday’s Vision for the Office of the CFO
For CFOs, 2021 is a career-defining moment. Companies that outperform their peers emerging from the crisis will set the pace for the years ahead. Finance leaders are reimagining their organizations for success in a post-pandemic economy. Our vision is to enable every CFO to unlock the potential of their people, processes, and data to enable more agile decision making, better business partnering across functions, and automation to drive more effective outcomes.
Deep commitment to customer success and satisfaction. Our commitments to delivering an exceptional customer experience and continuous innovation are helping a diverse range of industries and sectors. We’re honored that global organizations, including Aon, Crain Communications, EQ, NextDoor, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Veolia UK have selected Workday Financial Management. Along with our success in financial services, professional services, technology and media, retail, healthcare, higher education, and the public sector, Workday can accelerate finance transformation in complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) environments where “rip and replace” isn’t an immediate option, including a growing number of customers from product-based industries.
Relentless focus and delivery of data-infused innovation. The finance team’s role of providing business leaders with greater insights so they can make better decisions requires access to innovative tools and technologies. We’ve continued to invest in our unique architecture and intelligent data foundation to ensure our customers have the robust analytics and automation they need to respond to a changing world.
Workday Accounting Center is one example of the data-infused applications we offer. With this new solution, we’ve made it simple for accounting and finance to ingest high volumes of operational data, transform that data into accounting entries, and gain operational and financial insights directly from the system of record. This allows finance leaders to have confidence in the accuracy of data, while IT leaders have the assurance of well-governed data security and user access rights.
As Tina Workman, vice president of accounting and treasurer, Shelter Insurance, puts it, “Workday has proven they are a modern cloud system that delivers continuous innovation to its customers and is a true partner for Shelter Insurance. One recent example: We went live on Workday Accounting Center last year, and have since retired several legacy COBOL programs that had little visibility into creating accounting from operational systems.” She adds, “With Workday Accounting Center we have full transparency into detailed accounting creation from close to 75 files from policy, claims, and other systems, streamlining our accounting into one system and providing us with deeper insight into insurance product profitability.”
Workday’s intelligent data foundation also makes it possible to deliver embedded machine learning (ML) to solve real-world problems. Our customers can easily adopt and benefit from a number of ML-driven capabilities, including the ability to continuously detect journal line and plan anomalies, intelligently match customer payments to invoices, and automate supplier invoice processing. Workday continually evaluates end-to-end finance processes to determine the optimal points to infuse ML and transform the way finance teams work.
“We are thrilled that Workday is building machine learning into its core financial management application natively. We see this as a seamless extension to our AR process. This was a huge advantage compared to other point solutions,” says Preeti Iyer, senior director, finance, Blue Yonder. “Workday has all of our data, knows how we handle cash applications and how we applied payments in the past. This gave us a huge leap forward, is more cost effective, and has helped us realize value faster. Our goal is to reduce time spent on our complex cash application use cases, where we currently spend 70% of our time on manual matches, and reduce it to 20%.”
A unified planning and analytics platform for the office of the CFO. Bringing together planning and modeling, analytics, and the core system of record benefits both financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and accounting. Planners gain access to real-time actuals to fuel more accurate and active planning, which leads to better and more predictive outcomes. Accounting gains the ability to know their business position relative to the budget at all times. The deep integration between Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management, and Workday Adaptive Planning is increasingly important to customers who must continuously recalibrate their workforce, sales, and operations in response to dynamic conditions.
“As an international organization, we need to be dynamic and easily adapt to changing market conditions. With transaction and planning data in the same system, we're able to translate data into insight we need to make decisions,” says Robert Bloor, group financial controller, EQ. “Having our accounting and planning teams work off of the same data set makes it possible for us to be continuously agile and confident in our decision making.”
Global Organizations Trust Workday Financial Management
Our cloud-based solutions deliver the customer experience, the data foundation, and the continuous innovation to tackle whatever comes next. We know that shaking off the shackles of legacy technology can be a challenge. That's why we're proud to partner with our customers within the office of finance to help them drive digital acceleration, provide data-driven insights, and become an ever-more strategic partner to the business.
As the world emerges from the most challenging of times, we look forward to welcoming more organizations into the Workday community.
1Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises, John Van Decker, Greg Leiter, Robert Anderson, 10 May 2021
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