Professional services automation enables firms to organize projects, manage employees, and surface valuable insights more effectively. We talked with RSM US, a top U.S. accounting firm, to learn how it accelerated its digital transformation with Workday Professional Services Automation.
Founded in 1926, RSM is the leading provider of professional services to the middle market, with over 16,000 partners, principals, and employees. But far from resting on its laurels, RSM wanted to keep expanding globally. The company also wanted to more quickly accommodate organizational changes and new areas of business, as well as share data across HR and finance.
“We had ambitious growth and revenue goals and recognized we needed to accelerate our digital transformation initiative to support those goals,” said Brian Vickers, Workday business owner for finance and controller at RSM.
Service-centric organizations such as accounting firms must have real-time access to financial, workforce, and project data to move quickly, staff projects appropriately, and deliver better service. But data silos, slow processes, and operational inefficiencies were holding RSM back from effectively managing its performance as it scaled.
After deploying Workday Human Capital Management, Workday Financial Management, and Workday Payroll, RSM went live with Workday Professional Services Automation (PSA) in July 2023.
“With over 300,000 projects and over 15 million lines of WIP annually as of September 2023, RSM is our biggest customer by far,” said Stephanie Lai, senior project manager of project billing at Workday.
To learn more about RSM’s successful journey to deploy Workday PSA, including best practices and insights gleaned along the way, see the edited conversation below between Vickers and Lai at Workday Rising.
Brian Vickers: We identified three main goals for the deployment. Number one, we wanted to expand globally. Two, we have future ambitions to continue to expand on the HR side and activate employee self-service. And then finally PSA, which was the biggest piece for us. That’s what drives our business day in and day out. If that doesn’t work, we’re dead in the water.
So when we talked about ROI and profitability and how Workday shows value, it’s on the PSA side. Our goal is to drive down our days sales outstanding (DSO) by 20 days through automation, especially in the billing and revenue recognition cycles. That equates to $1.4 million in billing savings. And that reduction in the number of days in WIP would be $40 million.
And then finally we wanted to automate and report on our nontraditional revenues streams like managed service or hardware and software resale. Those were things we couldn’t do very well in our old system, and we’re excited that Workday can provide those capabilities.
“It was important for our end users to know when things aren’t showing correctly and when a recalculation needs to happen in the system. We’ve made strides on this performance: 44 hours to 4 hours. That’s huge.”
Brian Vickers
Workday Business Owner for Finance and Controller
RSM
Vickers: In May 2021, we signed the contract and selected a partner, Invisors, to help with the Workday implementation and Workday to help support the Workday PSA rollout from a design and product point of view. We started with Workday Financial Management first in July 2021—including accounts payable, general ledger, procurement, and assets—because we wanted to look at the accounting and make sure we had our base levels set up correctly.
We also started with financials because we knew HCM and PSA were going to be the biggest pieces and we had over 200 integrations between them. We needed a lot of time to work on those. With phase one, we went live in May 2022. It took less than a year, which we thought was pretty good.
We partnered with Invisors to help identify pain points of our phase two work, which was a huge reason why this second phase was a big success. It level-set Invisors on who we were and our pain points, and that clarified how we wanted to approach the architecture sessions as we went into the implementation.
We had two customer confirmation sessions. The second one became a focus group session, which was important for us because it helped us get buy-in. We brought together 80 owners, partners, principals, and employees in Chicago for two sessions. We gave them fixed scenarios that they ran through right after our first session.
We got feedback immediately from our end users on what worked and what didn’t. And thankfully there was a lot more that worked than didn’t, but it highlighted what we needed to work on before we got too far into the implementation.
The people in the focus groups became our change agents and helped us understand what our employees needed for the go-live. We used them for decisions and for bouncing ideas. For example, we didn’t go live with one revenue recognition option because we got the feedback that we’re not ready for it. And that was important.
Stephanie Lai: We began performance testing in November 2022, which included setting baselines and identifying the initial set of issues.
We worked together with three types of stakeholders: RSM, Workday services, and the Workday product and development team. Typically in a scenario like this, we first have to understand the problem. We talked to our services folks, who are on the ground and really understand the problem, use cases, and creative solutions. They could assess any identified functional gaps.
And then once we understood some of those gaps, we engaged with our Workday product and development team to help create a solution prototype for RSM review.
From a product lens, it’s important to note that these scenarios are not specifically unique to RSM. They’re unique to all of our customers in PSA. We need to provide a solution that will work for everyone.
In addition to the functional gaps, we also identified a number of performance considerations. RSM engaged with our performance readiness team and conducted a lot of tests with real use cases and data—surfacing some of the critical flows to address. Some critical flows within our billing review and repricing were really slow; ultimately, some were failing.
Vickers: We were doing calculations on 30,000 transactions. We brought in our IT team to help us with the QA and performance testing and made sure that we were following proper methodologies that the team has used in other applications. We were not just doing the baseline, easy use cases. We looked at our hard and most difficult use cases. That’s really where you find your big pain points.
We tried to simulate our production environment as closely as we could so that we could make it as real as possible. Not all of our integrations were up and running, so there were things that we couldn’t test around that performance that we did in the later sessions. But this gave us our baseline numbers to start working from and gave us our methodology that we could continue to use. We went through at least three or four rounds of performance testing before we got comfortable.
“We were able to reduce the load time from 5 minutes to 3.2 seconds and the search time from 2 minutes to 2.7 seconds.”
Stephanie Lai
Senior Project Manager of Project Billing
Workday
Lai: It’s critical before and after the go-live to keep that partnership alive between your organization, the product team, and the services team. We want to make sure that you continue to engage with us and give us use cases, not just features that you want. Test our new features and give us feedback.
It was also important to engage with the product team early, such as with brainstorms, DPGs, and early adopter programs.
Vickers: We had both an implementation partner and Workday trying to problem-solve issues, sharing best practices, recommending what will work or won’t, and asking detailed questions. Three brains are better than two. Having more people talking together was hugely important to our success.
Lai: We had a number of performance improvements. The first one I want to talk about is the mass submit process, which is a critical flow within the billing review. It’s a lot of data that RSM wants to be able to modify at once. It was slow at first and took up to two minutes to process 1,000 instances. We improved that time to nine seconds.
The next area of improvement was recalculation. Many organizations will have changes to ratings that end up ultimately changing their unbilled transactions. And those unbilled transactions need to be recalculated and repriced and to be correct before you invoice. And we were able to bring that processing time down from 44+ hours to about four hours for a million transactions.
Vickers: Recalculation is one of those product enhancements that came out of this later. It was important for our end users to know when things aren’t showing correctly and when a recalculation needs to happen in the system. We’ve made strides on this performance: 44 hours to 4. That’s huge.
Lai: We improved the billing review performance by over 98%. They’re reviewing all of their transactions before they send out invoices and need to be able to view and load the data and then search within that data. We were able to reduce the load time from five minutes to 3.2 seconds and the search time from two minutes to 2.7 seconds.
Vickers: The first time we tested it, it was five minutes. I was freaking out. That was November 2022. We went live in July 2023. Five minutes to 3.2 seconds. That was everything for us. If that wasn’t snappy for our end users, this whole thing would have been dead in the water as soon as we got live. So that was a huge improvement. Big kudos to the product team and everybody that made that happen.
“We had both an implementation partner and Workday trying to problem-solve, sharing best practices, recommending what will work or won’t, and asking detailed questions. Three brains are better than two. Having more people talking together was hugely important to our success.”
Brian Vickers
Workday Business Owner for Finance and Controller
RSM
Lai: Through the partnership with RSM, we were also able to recommend different ways for the company to view its data group and to recalculate its data in batches. And, we were able to recommend different processes to improve these times. So not only was the technical side of it important, but also the process improvements through understanding the use cases.
Vickers: Yes, it was huge. Two of those big enhancements are around the billing review. For larger projects, when you want to look at more than 1,000 lines of transactions within the Manage Project billing transaction screen, that really wasn’t something that we could do. We needed to be able to filter down and see summarized information.
And then on top of that, we needed to work directly with that summarized information. Previously, we didn’t have the options to review, recalculate, make billing decisions, and move statuses on WIP. Those were big improvements for us.
We’ve got projects that create 20,000 rows at a time. How do you manage and manipulate that data? Working directly with the product team on these enhancements was so important. I don’t know how we would have done it otherwise.
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