Announcing the 3 Finalists for Workday’s Inspire Award

Before we gather as a community at Workday Rising 2015 in Las Vegas next week, we want to share the stories of three innovative companies nominated for Workday’s Inspire Award. This award recognizes customers that are using Workday deployments in ways that inspire us all.

Allied Global took home the 2014 Inspire Award. Allied Global deployed Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Workday Financial Management in less than one year, and gained new insights via those deployments that resulted in dramatically reduced employee attrition rates and greater visibility into all of its business operations.

It was tough to choose just three finalists from this year’s submissions, as so many organizations had great stories about new business insights and transformational change. Yet after much deliberation the Inspire Award team narrowed finalists down to three companies: Abbott Laboratories, Morningstar, Inc., and Prudential Corporation Asia. We’ll announce the winner next week at Workday Rising!

Abbott Laboratories, headquartered in Chicago, is a pharmaceutical, medical device, and nutritional products company that employs approximately 73,000 people and serves customers in more than 170 countries.

With Workday as its core HR system, the company has consolidated or eliminated more than 200 disparate HR and payroll systems, both commercial and homegrown, within just one year of becoming a Workday customer. Just two days after its go-live date earlier this year, Abbott launched its employee stock award and incentive calibration process.

Abbott eliminated many manual processes with its Workday deployment. In the first six months, employees and managers conducted 825,000 transactions in Workday, and use Workday on mobile devices in 22 languages.

Chicago-based Morningstar, Inc. is a leading provider of independent investment research for individual investors, financial advisors, asset managers, and retirement plan providers and sponsors.  The company operates with more than 3,700 employees in 27 countries and provides data on approximately 473,000 investment offerings.

A Workday customer since 2012, Morningstar uses Workday HCM and Workday Recruiting for a single, global view of all talent, whether internal or new, in its recruiting pipeline. To support new product initiatives and fuel key growth areas, the company says it’s now on track to reach a goal to fill at least 50 percent of its staffing needs by promoting or making lateral moves from within.

As a company that employs primarily knowledge workers, Morningstar now has a consolidated view of current and future headcount costs, which represents about 70 percent of its total operating costs.

As the regional headquarters of Prudential plc in Hong Kong, Prudential Corporation Asia (PCA) is a life insurance and asset management company that employs 18,000 people in offices across Asia, Europe, and the U.S., with more than 13 million customers and $134 billion in assets under management.

A Workday HCM customer since 2012, PCA has leveraged Workday as a core HR system with built-in analytics capabilities to gain insights into all stages of the employee experience.

That starts with hiring, where PCA has gained unprecedented insight into the common traits of high-performing employees to make better hiring decisions. PCA has also identified critical stages of the new employee experience to reduce first-year turnover. In addition, PCA was able to conduct detailed analysis into promotion and hiring practices that led to new thinking in its organizational design and structure.

Congratulations to our three finalists, and we’ll see you at Workday Rising where we’ll announce the 2015 Inspire Award winner!