We’re delighted to share how our professional and business services customers are planning with agility, finding efficiencies in finance, and improving the employee experience. Read on to learn this year’s category winners for the Workday Industry Innovation Awards.
In this article we discuss:
At Workday, we value our inspiring and growing professional and business services community, where customers collaborate, innovate, and share best practices with each other.
To celebrate this community’s achievements, we’re delighted to share the 2024 winners of the second annual Workday Professional and Business Services Innovation Awards. Announced at Workday Rising in September, these awards honor Workday customers who consistently cultivate improvements across their organization, support and empower their peers, and advance the industry.
“The professional services community has always been at the forefront of innovation,” says Patrice Cappello, managing director of the professional and business services industry at Workday. “We are incredibly excited to recognize our winners as they invest in their firms and drive the industry forever forward with Workday.”
Without further ado, here are the stories behind our winners.
This award recognizes customers who use Workday to transform service delivery, enhance people operations, or create a delightful employee experience.
Cognizant’s Workday Practice experienced issues with employee-facing materials stored in disparate internal and external applications. The workforce struggled to find documentation on critical information, such as leave processes, compliance needs, and employee benefits.
To solve this challenge, the team created the custom dashboard Practice Central, which is tailored to an employee’s location for access to all employee-facing documentation and quick links to outside vendors. For managers, the team built Manager Central, which contains real-time learning and performance information only relevant to managers’ teams.
Through the use of custom domains, prompt sets, and bulletin worklets, Cognizant created a single cohesive experience with Practice Central. It combined more than 30 different reports from many business units and functional areas—talent, learning, compensation, and more. The team is also now able to easily audit and make changes quarterly to ensure that people can access the information relevant to them.
“I believe every Workday customer can do this currently and would see a tremendous amount of value,” said Ryan O’Donnell, senior manager, HR applications at Cognizant’s Workday Practice. “By aggregating the materials, doing testing and reviewing with the business team, and having organizational buy-in, it’s possible to complete this project with a four- to six-week plan. Every worker will benefit from this dashboard. It’s a win-win.”
The Smart Money Award celebrates customers who leverage Workday to innovate and transform service delivery, finance operations, spend management, or financial planning. BDO Canada is a standout example, addressing a significant operational challenge through strategic use of Workday technology.
Like many accounting firms, BDO Canada encountered inefficiencies in managing partner contributions. The finance department manually handled contribution notifications, relying heavily on Microsoft Excel, Word, PDFs, and emails. This process was cumbersome, error-prone, and time-consuming, limiting productivity and creating risks for errors.
To resolve these challenges, BDO Canada developed a new application in Workday Extend called Partner Capital, which automates the entire contribution management process. Now, the finance team can upload contribution requirements directly into the application, and partners can log into Workday to review and complete necessary details. Workday then generates all required documents, such as subscription agreements or bank letters, and automatically emails them to the appropriate recipients.
The impact of the Partner Capital project has been transformative, enhancing the management of partner contributions across BDO Canada. Partners can now access and review their capital positions at any time, eliminating the need for manual templates and document generation. For the finance team, real-time reporting enables efficient tracking of capital details and payment statuses, while partners appreciate the transparency and ease of access to their information.
Feedback on this initiative has been overwhelmingly positive. Tasks that previously took weeks for the finance team to complete are now handled automatically, freeing up time for more strategic activities. Partners can manage their contributions effortlessly, with the ability to view their capital positions in real time, reducing the need for paperwork.
The Partner Capital application has streamlined operations by automating document generation and communication processes. Over 500 documents have been automatically generated and stored, without any manual intervention. Automated processes also ensure consistent compliance with regulatory requirements, significantly reducing compliance risks.
By leveraging Workday Extend, the solution integrates seamlessly with BDO Canada’s existing Workday ecosystem. Partners and finance teams can access the application through a familiar interface, promoting ease of use and ensuring data consistency across the platform.
BDO Canada's innovative use of Workday Extend has not only optimized internal processes but has also enhanced partner satisfaction, making it a deserving recipient of the Smart Money Award.
This award recognizes customers pioneering digital solutions that extend core Workday capabilities to address the needs of service-based organizations.
By remaining human-centered while integrating Gen AI into its processes, Accenture enabled more frequent feedback cycles—improving the quality of feedback provided, with a remarkable 90% of feedback now classified as high quality.
Accenture delivered a reinvention initiative, Powering Performance Through Gen AI, to improve organizational feedback and enhance employee development. The company wanted to transform how it managed performance processes such as feedback, employee and manager talent discussions, and ongoing career growth. Through strategic partnerships and pioneering technology deployments, Accenture optimized performance, enriched the employee experience, and fostered a culture of continuous improvement.
Accenture leveraged Workday Extend, native Workday functionalities, and ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo hosted on Microsoft Azure to create 2 Gen AI solutions: Feedback Coach, which assists in drafting anytime feedback; and Anytime Performance Summary, which synthesizes all performance data for an individual. These solutions are embedded within 3 Workday Extend applications: Feedback Hub, Priorities, and ABCD Reflections, accessible globally on worker profiles.
By harnessing the capabilities of Gen AI alongside the robust Workday ecosystem, this program exemplifies how advanced technology can drive meaningful organizational change while leveraging AI ethically. Accenture went to great lengths to make sure each initiative adhered to its strict responsible AI standards and DPIA regulations.
By remaining human-centered while integrating Gen AI into its processes, Accenture enabled more frequent and real-time feedback cycles—also improving the quality of feedback provided, with a remarkable 90% of feedback now classified as high quality.
The impact of Accenture’s efforts extends beyond efficiency gains. It has observed an impressive 89% increase in the frequency of feedback exchanges, promoting continuous learning and growth among employees while achieving a 60% reduction in the average time spent on feedback documentation and summarization- and performance-related activities.
“Our collaboration with Workday Professional Services was pivotal in enabling, optimizing, and scaling each of the applications,” says Andria Harriman, solutions architect at Accenture. “They provided expert guidance in integrating Workday Extend experiences with multiple Gen AI use cases.”
Workday Professional Services also guided Accenture through complex deployment challenges to accommodate over 750,000 employees globally, she adds. “This collaboration has helped us achieve our lofty goals at a pace we could not have otherwise done.”
“Workday has allowed us to focus more on our people and less on administrative tasks.”—Simone Nardi, CFO, G-P
The Platform Rock Star Award recognizes customers who use a combination of Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Financial Management to drive digital transformation and business effectiveness.
G-P created the employer of record (EOR) space more than a decade ago and is the leader in global employment.
G-P chose Workday as its strategic partner, integrating a suite of Workday products. It was important to G-P to align Workday systems with diverse international compliance requirements and ensure real-time data synchronization across 187 entities.
Despite these complexities, the integration was successfully completed and consolidated 7 unique systems and manual processes, reducing onboarding time by 85%, decreasing business processing time by up to 60%, and reducing G-P’s monthly time to close by 5 days.
G-P’s innovative use of Workday products has enabled it to enhance operational efficiency, ensure compliance, and maintain its position as a trusted partner in global growth, empowering businesses to expand with minimal risk.
“Workday has enabled us to focus more on our people and less on administrative tasks,” says Laura Maffucci, head of human resources at G-P. “Our operations are now more agile and responsive. The success of this project has set a new standard in our industry.”
Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to all our professional and business services customers for your continued commitment to driving the industry forward with Workday. Do you have your own innovative story to tell? Applications for 2025 are open, and we are excited to continue the tradition next year.
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