RaceTrac Champions Data-Driven Innovation and Cost Management with Workday

In this article we discuss:

• Streamlining HR and Accounting at RaceTrac
• Data-Driven Innovation
• Tangible Business Benefits

This article, written by Kieron Allen, an analyst at Acceleration Economy, first appeared on Acceleration Economy’s site and is republished with permission.

With close to 1,000 gas stations and convenience stores located across the U.S., RaceTrac has a massive retail presence. To control costs and manage financial data across this vast network of outlets, RaceTrac turned to Workday.

Bob Evans, founder of Cloud Wars and co-founder of Acceleration Economy, caught up with RaceTrac’s Vice President of Accounting Merlix Reynolds to discuss the company’s challenges and how Workday helped overcome them.

Moving from a manual system—which involved paper trails and complex financial reporting that only accountants at RaceTrac could understand—to a single, accessible platform has transformed the way the company manages critical data.

Streamlining HR and Accounting at RaceTrac

RaceTrac adopted Workday for its HR and finance management teams, and the results were transformative, explains Reynolds. “We’ve been able to benefit from all of the automation the tool offers,” she says, adding that in the financial function, “we have been able to cut our close process by a few days because we can do things efficiently.” The Workday system also helps enforce business rules and ensure timely payments.

“We’ve been able to put workflow and controls in place to help us apply our purchasing approval threshold, get things to people at the right time—whether they’re in the office or they’re remote—get payments processed quickly within several days, and not a week.”

And then there’s the impact on reporting, which has been significantly improved with the ability to put reporting insights in the hands of users at any moment.

Ultimately, centralizing its HR and financial data into a single platform has enabled consistency, with everyone in the organization speaking the same language and referencing the same data to reach conclusions more quickly. This consistency makes companies like RaceTrac more flexible, a crucial benefit in an increasingly competitive and quickly evolving business climate.

Data-Driven Innovation

How has Workday enabled RaceTrac to become more data-driven? The software adds dimensionality to the company’s data and “worktags” that are used to classify transactions have “revolutionized” how employees use the data, Reynolds says. “They’re not afraid of the data; they understand the data. They can come to us and ask us for different manipulations of the data and/or different tagging or dimensions to truly serve them. So that has taken us to a whole other level.”

With Workday in place, siloed data analysis and reporting have become a thing of the past, which has streamlined and fine-tuned RaceTrac’s data strategy. “Prior to this, people would say ‘I rely on my own reports, my own Excel, my own quantification of what the business is doing,’” she recounts. “Now they’re inviting us into the room because they know that they can tell us what they need. We can put it in Workday and give them the reporting—along with any other connected things that they may not think impact them—all in one place.”

Tangible Business Benefits

While advancing data-driven innovation and streamlining processes is an important business strategy, it sometimes takes time to quantify the direct business outcomes. However, implementing an adaptable platform into RaceTrac has brought ongoing business benefits.

“The business approaches us all the time when they have different needs, and they’re trying to do different things, to truly serve our customers and manage our P&L,” says Reynolds. “The fact that they can come to us and we can understand how to integrate, bring in data, maybe even see that there’s a Workday module that can do it, we don’t need to go outside the platform.”

This dramatically slashes the time it takes to provide stakeholders with the information they need to drive better business results. “Back in the day, when people didn’t have that single source of truth and didn’t rely on the definitions or didn’t agree with how we define things, we would spend hours and sometimes days and weeks reconciling between what they developed and what we have,” explains Reynolds. “We can do that so quickly, within hours—at the most, a day.” The company can reconcile expectations with reality since the company is working from a single source of truth, and Reynolds says she now sleeps better at night as a result.

Crucially, Workday has responded to the direct needs of customers like RaceTrac. “I know that if there’s something that I can’t do, we can get on calls with Workday, we can be in partner groups with them, we can talk on the Workday community site, and Workday really listens to what I need,” says Reynolds. 

“We’ve seen even in the last few years that we’ve been on this platform, the evolution of the product in spaces that we needed some evolution to happen, and it’s happened.”

Reynolds says she knows Workday is investing in its technology to make sure customers like RaceTrac can remain nimble amid evolving business conditions.

To see the entire conversation, watch the video.