From Zero to Sixty: Team Car Care Accelerates Digital Finance With Workday

When Matt Castonguay first joined the finance team at Team Car Care, the largest franchisee of Jiffy Lube stores, one challenge called for his immediate attention: The finance professionals who support some 500 Jiffy Lube outlets in 26 states were wedded to spreadsheets as their primary financial planning solution. With the pandemic spurring demand for used cars—and the automotive aftercare services market exploding—those spreadsheets were just not powerful enough to allow Team Car Care to take advantage of the significant growth opportunity the changing marketplace offered, Castonguay said.

“When it came to scenario planning and figuring out the future of finance at Team Car Care, we didn’t really have the tools to do that,” recalled Castonguay, who currently serves as senior vice president of finance, analytics, and supply chain at the company, which counts some 4,000 employees. He and his staff set out to find an automated planning tool that would “enable the team to spend time on analysis, rather than digging through spreadsheets.”

During a “fireside chat” at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) 2022 Accounting & Finance Conference, Castonguay described his team’s journey from spreadsheets to fully automated financial planning with Workday Adaptive Planning. The chat was hosted by Anne Ozzimo, senior director, office of the CFO at Workday, a conference sponsor.

To prepare for automated planning, Castonguay and team set out the parameters for their new financial planning solution and made a list of must-have characteristics. One requirement was ease of use for collaboration among team members at Team Car Care, which has been owned by Wynnchurch Capital since 2018. Castonguay also learned his team was expected to find a replacement for the company’s aging enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, purchased all the way back in 2003, which he calls the “stone age.” Ever since, the accounting team had been implementing “their own tools and processes around it just to survive,” he said.

Soon, Castonguay realized, what started as an effort to update the company’s planning solution blossomed into a systematic search for a new ERP implementation. Then the CEO asked if Castonguay could also replace the company’s human capital management (HCM) system at the same time. “Our search for a planning tool turned into a much larger endeavor,” Castonguay said in an understatement.

After evaluating several options from various vendors, the team chose Workdays Enterprise Management Cloud, which combines best-in-class finance, human capital management, and financial planning applications in one system, so that collaborators across company operations can make decisions based on the latest information.

“With Workday, we found a platform that wasn’t just an ERP, planning system, and HCM, but really a platform for us to apply analytics and drive everything from planning all the way through to reporting,” Castonguay said. Castonguay’s colleague Pranay Arya, manager of corporate FP&A and data science, agreed, stating, “Workday has been a game changer for us. It’s so much easier for us to partner across the business now that we’re on the same page using real-time data.”

With the new platform, Team Car Care experts began experimenting with ways to use machine learning—a form of artificial intelligence that allows software applications to “learn” how to predict future outcomes using historical data—without relying on additional programming.

The company is using machine learning to forecast how many customers will stop by individual Jiffy Lube stores at various times during the day, then feed that customer count into the company’s sales and workforce plans. Machine learning will also help Team Car Care forecast how many of each of 500 products they’ll need to have in stock at each store, to automate replenishment. To power this effort, Team Car Care is an early adopter of Workday Intelligent Demand Forecasting.

The company also is using Workday Accounting Center to collect and analyze point-of-sale information from the Jiffy Lube stores to simplify accounting and help the company better understand what its customers are buying and how long each car spends in the repair bay, and automatically create reports to management for “continuous planning.”

The time is right for a “smart” platform that empowers finance leaders, said Workday’s James Hsieh, director of financial planning and analysis, and another IMA session speaker. Citing recent studies by industry consultants  KPMG, Deloitte, and AICPA, Hsieh explained that today’s finance leaders are shifting their focus from the management of cost centers to serving as a valued resource at their companies. “It’s absolutely essential for finance leaders to really think about how value’s being defined and created today and how we can help the enterprise capture and deliver these values,” Hsieh said.

Workday announced recently that more than 5,900 companies are now using Workday Adaptive Planning to forecast and plan for a future changed by the pandemic. Workday’s adaptive planning large-enterprise customers are, on average, creating 40% more planning scenarios compared to pre-pandemic levels, underscoring the increasing value of continuous planning to anticipate challenges and adapt to change in a constantly evolving business environment.

For Team Car Care, it’s been a little more than one year since Castonguay first saw a demonstration of Workday’s capabilities, and the company is already reaping the rewards of its new system. With Team Car Care’s finance, planning, and human resources functions all connected, Castonguay predicts, “We’ll continue to improve our collaboration and roll out extra functionality that will help the team.”

In addition, employees are feeling reinvigorated by being freed from living in spreadsheets 24/7. “It’s night and day. Before Workday, we spent so much time consolidating reports that we could barely keep our heads above water. Now, we can help guide the business, which makes our days so much more rewarding,” said Arya. Already, Team Car Care is seeing the advantages of centralizing planning, rather than the old method of passing 50-plus spreadsheets around between the district managers. This reduced the cycle time for forecast scenarios from a month to days, allowing several iterations to occur simultaneously with all levels of management looking at the same set of numbers.

“We’ve got 250,000 SKU-item combinations. We wanted to do detailed planning without having to spend four months at a time coming up with that detail,” Castonguay said. “Now we can feed our operational and financial data into our Workday system so we can have instant access to a ‘single source of truth’ for everything that’s going on in the business.”

Matt Castonguay will be speaking about his experiences at our Workday Rising conference, taking place from September 12-15 in Orlando, Florida.