Thoumine closed his discussion by quoting Warby Parker Co-Founder Neil Blumenthal, who has said, “Retail isn’t dead, but mediocre retail experiences are dead.”
The summit also featured a panel of Workday customers in the retail and hospitality industries. Practice leads from Gategroup and PUMA discussed how Workday supports their digital transformation strategies and core values.
For example, one speaker shared how Workday helps contribute to the company’s sustainability mission. With access to Workday, the company’s canteen manager gets a more accurate representation of the number of employees at headquarters on any given day. This helps him adjust food production and reduce food waste.
Another speaker explained that her company’s core values include transparency and respect. By adopting Workday, her organization has a system where information is immediately available and transparent for employees. Now, the technology employees use supports the values the company espouses.
Financial Services and Insurance: Is Your Organization Agile?
Success in financial services and insurance requires becoming more agile from an organizational perspective. That was the big takeaway from a customer panel at the Financial Services and Insurance Summit. Practice leads from Lloyds Banking Group, Man Group, and Rabobank shared how their firms are tackling digital transformation by focusing on speed and agility.
Panelists touched on challenges ranging from the need to recruit and retain talent, standardize and simplify systems and processes, and stay ahead of regulations. Having a single system can be a big help. As one speaker put it, “If you want to grow and move quickly, while remaining compliant, you need to have a global platform.”
Each speaker emphasized the need for digital transformation to encompass the entire organization. The customer-facing part of their businesses have always been extremely agile, they said, but internal teams such as finance and HR have sometimes been more traditional. They encouraged attendees to move away from monolithic, multi-year projects that sometimes fail to deliver, to more frequent, incremental improvements. That leads to more value being delivered into the hands of employees, which in turn helps recruit and retain the best talent, leading to a beneficial cycle for all.