From a maintenance perspective, one system is much more streamlined with just two major updates each year. We also don’t have to stop what we’re doing or worry about updates in sandbox and our development environments because of Workday’s single codeline approach. Workday rolls out minor updates each week, and we can choose when to adopt those features. This is especially beneficial when you are working on something big and don’t want to constantly refresh.
Ensono has positioned itself for significant growth. What are the biggest goals from a systems perspective over the next few years?
We have aggressive revenue growth goals over the next five years; in order to successfully meet our goals we have to ensure we have a strong enterprise system in place to withstand all the inevitable changes.
We also have a lot of opportunity to standardize our products and automate processes, like billing transactions, to ensure we are providing the high quality services our customers expect. If we were stuck doing all of these things manually, there would be no way to handle the growth we want to achieve. So one of our objectives is automating more processes within Workday, and integrating Workday with our other operational tools so that we can have a cohesive set of information flowing between all systems. This will allow us to spend more time working side-by-side with clients to help them achieve their business goals.
What are some of the biggest challenges you face today, and how do you build a team capable of taking those on?
Right now, getting ourselves set up and established within the company is really important, and adding more staff members to our team comes along with that. Recruiting the right talent is probably our biggest challenge right now. We’ve relied a lot on our technical recruiters as well as Workday Recruiting to find prospects with the right skills and experience. It’s really important we hire people that have solid leadership skills, not so much to manage people, but to manage projects. We need people who can lead something all the way through with little direct support and a lot of cross-functional communication.
How do you think the role of controller will evolve in the future?
Having access to the right information on a timely basis will be the key. We’ve already seen improvements in this with Workday from a financial perspective. It would typically take us about 7-10 days to close our monthly books, but now it takes us five. Having accurate financial data is not only critical for us to have on day six, but on a quarterly basis as well when we meet with our board. It goes without saying that having accurate information for those meetings helps us make more efficient business decisions. The more value we can provide to the executive team, the more direct impact we will have on future growth.