Workday Again Named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises

We’re excited to announce that Workday has once again been recognized as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises¹ based on our completeness of vision and our ability to execute.

Workday was recognized for the second time since the category’s inception last year. 

We’ve also been recognized for six years in a row as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises and received placement as a Leader in the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software in 2022.

Learn Why We’re a Leader Again

There are some unique aspects about Workday Enterprise Management Cloud we believe help us in this recognition. First, we’re a leader born in the cloud, designed with an adaptable architecture to enable agility and unite service-centric industry technology ecosystems to manage money and people. This is all key to our strategy to unlock the potential of these organizations’ data, processes, and people.

We do this by:

• Intelligently streamlining processes. Workday Financial Management transforms transactions into continuous accounting in real time, while embedded artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) detect unusual activity and recommend action all in the same system. Meanwhile, Workday Spend Management automates procurement processes with ML to tackle off-contract spend and worker inefficiencies. This sets a new standard for intelligent automation, giving the business time back to focus on analysis and action.

• Enabling powerful ways to use data. To guide the business, finance needs deeper insights, faster. Workday Prism Analytics enables Workday to interoperate with industry-specific revenue and expense systems by integrating high-volume data and blending this together with financial and worker data, uniting the information the business needs to make decisions. Workday Accounting Center transforms this business event data—such as insurance claims or retail point-of-sale data—into detailed accounting, uniting all accounting in one system as well. The result: unmatched granular insights in a cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, empowering teams to look at profitability in deeper ways including by product type, customer, and more. This data then fuels Workday Adaptive Planning, an agile enterprise wide planning solution that allows financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams to plan at a more granular level.

• Unlocking the potential of people. With Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and an intuitive experience, organizations unlock the potential of their most valuable asset—their people—by engaging and growing skills and intelligently matching workers to projects, while keeping a pulse on employee sentiment with Workday Peakon Employee Voice.

Workday Grows Market Share Yet Again

According to Gartner market share research,²  Workday had the highest market share in 2022 for ERP worldwide software as a service (SaaS) revenue at 21%. We believe the core points of differentiation listed above are driving more companies to Workday, leading to the largest market share growth last year.

Today, Workday is deployed in more than 175 countries with more than 60 million active users around the world.

We Put Customers at the Center

Our differentiation and growth stem from our relentless focus on customer satisfaction. We lead by setting a customer satisfaction goal of 95%, which we beat year over year. And this is one of the many reasons we believe our customers view Workday as a trusted global partner for the office of the CFO and the C-suite as a whole.

Let’s explore why, using customer sentiment as a guide.

Workday Empowers the Business to Create Value

To survive in our fast-changing world, the business must adapt to grow. CFOs are increasingly expected to support this effort by moving from tracking value to creating it, even driving business growth strategies as a sort of “chief value officer,” and they must partner closely with the CIO and CHRO to do so.

Many of our customers are embracing this evolution. “We want to be value generators, value creators, and that means not just sticking to the old ways,” says the chief accounting officer and corporate controller at Brown & Brown Insurance. “Finance on my team is not a spectator sport.”

Companies leaning into value creation are also making the most of their investment in Workday.

To Create Value, You Must Be Agile

“We’re more agile with Workday because our people can operate and respond at the pace of daily business. Rather than spending 75% of their time on data gathering and 25% on analysis, staff are spending 90% of their time on analysis and 10% on data gathering,” says the senior vice president, finance and analytics at Pinnacle Technical Resources, which offers comprehensive contingent workforce staffing, managed services, vendor management services, and payroll services. “Fortune 100 companies expect a certain level of technology. We meet their expectations with Workday, and that helps power our growth.”

At the heart of that agility is Workday Enterprise Management Cloud, which has a native cloud platform with an adaptable architecture that enables users to adapt the platform to their needs with clicks instead of code. And it’s easy to integrate with. Workday provides a no-code integration builder with more than 700 prebuilt templates to quickly, efficiently, and securely interoperate across the enterprise, while low-code configurations support a wide variety of data processes.

Continued focus on growing our ability to interoperate is also made evident through our Industry Accelerators program, designed to help organizations across all industries—including professional and business services, banking and capital markets, healthcare, technology, and more—to optimize their enterprise cloud transformation efforts. 

We, as a software company, can also adapt our own technology thanks to its architecture. This has allowed us to uniquely embed AI and ML into the foundation of our platform, which is only possible because our architecture was created to support change. We’ve also given users a way to unite data to power applications and decisions, something that legacy architectures were not built to do—despite what they may claim.

“With Workday, we consolidated multiple systems into one simple-to-use solution across finance and HR [human resources],” says the vice president of finance at N26, a Germany-based digital bank. “Having one system is really the key to the agility and innovation we need, and we are seeing tremendous gains already in accessing real-time financial data, employee productivity, and user satisfaction.”

Evolve the Way Teams Work With Intelligent Automation

“We had never done a fully remote close before as we operate in 120 countries with over 700 legal entities,” says the CFO, Asia, at Aon, a global professional services and management consulting firm. “While we were nervous, it was a very pleasant surprise that our close went smoothly and we closed on time. In fact, some of the countries and regions closed before time, benefiting from the one system that we had with Workday.” Our global customers are benefitting with tangible results, including a faster financial close across multiple jurisdictions.

Companies can rely on Workday to help them drive a faster and more accurate close with continuous accounting that leads to real-time insight. And, we’ve embedded ML into the core and applied it to key transactions and processes—while safeguarding privacy, of course—to detect journal and payroll anomalies, allowing the business to focus on value process creation continuously versus at the end of the financial period.

And as data volumes continue to grow, applying ML to investigate data quality and accuracy will become an increasingly important risk-mitigation strategy. And we’re actively pursuing our next wave of AI and ML innovation to determine the best opportunities for our customers with generative AI.

Drive the Business Forward With the Power of Data

Creating value requires insight. Our intelligent data core unites data from revenue systems together with financial and worker information to deliver an unmatched depth of insight to understand profitability in added ways and drive decisions that create value. The intelligent data core provides a single source of truth for people and money to not only drive greater value, but to inform scenario planning and empower employees to achieve their potential.

• “Because of the insights our finance professionals are able to provide using Workday, the business is able to make strategic decisions,” says the vice president, finance technology, at Unum Group, a United States-based provider of financial insurance products. 

• The assistant vice president of finance at Giant Tiger, a Canadian discount store chain, says, “We chose Workday because we wanted to become a strategic partner to all elements of the business and bring in insights every day. We wanted to spend our time driving the business forward.”

• “We’ve been able to drive better decision-making now that we’ve got a single, simplified source of truth throughout the business,” says the CFO of Aurecon, an international engineering, design, and advisory firm based in Australia. “It helps to be able to look at all the various metrics together. That’s so useful from a project planning perspective, helping us drive greater efficiency.”

• The vice president of finance and controller at Healthfirst, a New York-based nonprofit health insurer, says, “Financial data is more readily available. And we can put it into our reporting for regulatory compliance, which lets us analyze it and respond to requests or audit questions faster.”

Build Future-Ready Skills Into the Enterprise

With processes optimized and access to the right information, people are able to focus on what matters. And, given the current challenge of attracting, recruiting, and retaining talented people, organizations need to understand the skills they have today and those they’ll need to ensure a future-ready workforce.

To address this enterprise need, we have pioneered the extremely versatile open skills intelligence foundation Workday Skills Cloud, which uses AI and ML to manage vast amounts of HR and employee data to identify patterns, learn, and surface insights. It understands worker skills in context and provides suggestions and inferences on “build-buy-borrow” talent strategies to identify, track, and develop the skills that matter most, whatever they may be.

With these insights, organizations can better manage critical people resources to grow and sustain their businesses, so it’s no surprise to us that 27% of our Fortune 500 customers are using Workday Skills Cloud. Since it launched five years ago, customers have processed skills over 5 billion times.

No other ERP vendor can harness the power and tap the potential of people like Workday.

When you put all of this together on one adaptable architecture, we unlock the power of data, processes, and people—helping CFOs optimize profitability and resources for their organizations around the globe.

Read the complimentary “Gartner Magic Quadrant for Services-Centric ERP” report. 

_{¹Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises, Denis Torii, Sam Grinter, Tim Faith, Naveen Mahendra, Neha Ralhan, Robert Anderson, 29 August 2023}

 _{²Gartner® Market Share: Enterprise Application Software as a Service, Worldwide, 2022, Neha Gupta, Yanna Dharmasthira, Chris Pang, Craig Roth, Jim Hare, Alys Woodward, Julian Poulter, Balaji Abbabatulla, Eric Hunter, Kevin Quinn, Amarendra ., Roland Johnson, Radu Miclaus, Mudit Sharma, Kanchi Bindal, Alexandre Oddos, 22 June 2023.}

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