We’re delighted to celebrate our higher education and public sector customers who continue to provide targeted and responsive services to their students and communities. Read on to learn this year’s category winners for the Workday Industry Innovation Awards.
In this article we discuss:
Our Workday customers regularly inspire us with their dedication and resourcefulness. And with these innovative partners at our side, we’ve developed solutions and systems that strengthen organizations and improve employee well-being.
Their commitment to service is impressive—just one reason we were pleased to celebrate the winners of our Public Sector and Higher Education Innovation Awards at Workday Rising in Las Vegas. Below we share the stories of these customers and their notable work.
Akron, Ohio prides itself on being a city of firsts: The first K–12 public school system in the U.S., the first rubber tire, the first police car—even the first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. But when the city’s data was hacked in 2019, government leaders knew that to continue trailblazing, they needed to modernize their technology and business processes.
The city government of more than 2,300 employees became the first municipal customer to deploy via Launch for Government, decommissioning multiple legacy systems in favor of Workday’s unified approach. Less than a year later, Akron’s entire back office—finance, procurement, HR, and payroll—was migrated to the cloud, all while employees worked remotely during the pandemic.
“If you haven’t had legacy systems for 30 years, it’s hard to describe how transformational the idea of Workday is, let alone having them come in and say, ‘Hey, why implement in three years like you usually do? Let’s do it in 45 weeks!’” said Darren Rozenek, Akron’s longtime chief technology officer, speaking at Workday Rising. “It was a very bold decision.”
Not only did that decision establish a much higher level of security, it also created a centralized platform that improved the city’s budgeting processes, increased the speed of transaction approvals through mobile adoption, and boosted the efficiency of its supply chain and vendor payment process.
Fast forward to 2024, and Akron continues to blaze new trails by implementing additional Workday models and building AI apps that improve constituent services. The city’s administrators also act as generous participants in Workday’s vibrant customer community, regularly connecting with other customers and prospects to answer questions and share Akron’s journey.
The University of Arkansas System comprises several higher education institutions across 21 campuses—including a medical school, law schools, community colleges, and more. Given these sprawling operations, the UA System needed to transform its technology solutions to increase efficiency and provide a seamless experience for more than 70,000 students and 37,000 faculty and staff.
After moving all 21 institutions to Workday HCM and Finance by 2022, the UA System became an early adopter of multi-institution functionality for Workday’s Student product and took a major step in its modernization project when it consolidated student information systems across seven of its institutions in early 2024. The remaining six institutions that service students will go live on Workday Student in 2025.
The UA System created a single solution to support students, employees, healthcare patients, and researchers while offering administrators a wealth of real-time data. With Workday, students gained access to self-service capabilities that allow them to efficiently register for courses, track work study hours, manage financial aid, view grades, or request an advising appointment—all through a mobile device. Meanwhile, university leaders gain comprehensive data around registration, changing enrollment trends, supplier costs, and many other critical elements of academic administration.
As an early adopter of multi-institution functionality for Workday’s Student product, the UA System took a major step in its modernization project when it consolidated 14 disparate finance, HR, and operational systems across seven of its institutions in early 2024.
Alongside this effort, the UA System also adopted common course numbers across its institutions, a move that will remove barriers to higher education by helping students optimize transfers and efficiently complete their degrees while reducing administrative burden.
By aligning and integrating enterprise data and processes, the UA System has taken a major step in its larger modernization project. With the Workday platform, the 14 colleges and universities can easily deploy system-wide student success systems while providing a modern and consistent student experience across all of its institutions to increase student retention and degree completion.
As small and mid-sized higher education institutions everywhere grapple with reduced public funding, declining enrollment projections, and the need to stay competitive while improving student outcomes, a groundbreaking partnership in New Mexico demonstrates an innovative path forward.
CHESS brings together six independent community colleges that serve diverse student populations. The collaborative was created to address the threat of school consolidation or closure, as New Mexico—which is the fifth-largest state by area but has a population of just 2.1 million—struggled to provide educational access with its small tax base.
In order to improve efficiency and the student experience, the schools voluntarily came together to replace their individual, outdated administrative systems with a single, shared technology solution.
By using Workday’s platform to unite and consolidate the colleges’ financial, HR, and payroll activities, CHESS achieved alignment across more than 90% of the hundreds of business processes that each school previously handled independently. This has realized major savings: Running one centralized payroll, for example, has helped save each college about 50% in costs, while system maintenance costs have also markedly declined.
The benefits don’t stop with cost savings. Moving to a single cloud-based platform also allows CHESS to put the transformation of its student experience as the top goal; the next modernization project is to add Workday Student. This will allow CHESS to create one system across its institutions to truly innovate to streamline operations and focus on student outcomes—and therefore improving educational equity for students in rural, less-resourced areas.
By using Workday’s platform to unite and consolidate the colleges’ financial, HR, and payroll activities, CHESS achieved alignment across more than 90% of the hundreds of business processes that each school previously handled independently.
CHESS continues to pioneer ways to leverage Workday to address students’ needs. Going forward, “We will be pursuing innovative ways to make it easier to interact with prospective employers, seamlessly transition students between credit and noncredit programs, and connect students with workforce opportunities in ways that grow local economies,” says CHESS CEO Kathy Ulibarri.
As the home of the world’s first electronic digital computer and high-resolution virtual reality lab, Iowa State University certainly embraces the promise of technology. No wonder that it became one of the first top-tier research universities to select three Workday product suites—Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management/Payroll, and Workday Student— at once in 2016.
Fast forward eight years, and the results have been remarkable. Working with its implementation partner, Huron Consulting, ISU has not only simplified and standardized business processes across its eight colleges, but has also leveraged Workday’s mobile functionality to enable remote work during the pandemic, developed innovative applications through Workday Extend, and transformed how students onboard, register for classes, apply for financial aid, and access faculty advisors with Workday Student. Today, the university enjoys a year-over-year enrollment increase and a sense of pride in its commitment to forward-looking modernization.
Throughout its Workday journey, ISU has consistently shared ideas about how to transform administrative and student processes with its faculty, staff, and more than 30,000 students—as well as the broader higher ed community. In fact, since launching Workday, the university has fielded more than 60 requests from other universities interested in learning about its transformational work and welcomed their administrators for site visits.
"Thanks to the efforts and support of Workday and Huron, we have dramatically improved our processes and efficiencies and built a culture of change at Iowa State that we benefit from daily,” said Kristi Darr, ISU’s vice president of human resources.
Student success is a top priority at Tallahassee State College, which offers more than 100programs of study, including associate degrees that provide paths for transferring to a four-year college. To deliver that success, the college needed a new approach to engage and support its students throughout their education journey.
Using Workday Extend and Prism to create a custom set of academic advising tools, TSC developed a proactive advising model, “App2Cap,” that engages students immediately after applications and stays close to them through graduation. With this model, students are assigned an advisor within 20 minutes of submitting an application. Communication between students and staff begins instantly and is complemented by an easy-to-use system that lets students see their advisor’s availability in real time and book an appointment with just a few clicks.
Beyond improving students’ engagement with their advisors, App2Cap also empowers students to become partners in building their own customized academic plan based on their intended major and transfer institution. Moreover, its dashboards allow advisors to monitor registration, academic standing, and academic plans for each of their advisors in real time, helping them to better understand where to focus their attention.
As a result, more than 90% of TSC students have rated their advising experience as “extremely helpful” or “very helpful,” and 88% have an academic plan that provides a clear path and purpose for their studies. At the same time, App2Cap’s focus on early engagement has led students to register for classes much earlier, boosting enrollment and retention, including an 11% increase in credit hours for the fall 2024 semester.
As the second-largest county in Alabama, Mobile County is home to more than 400,000 people—but until recently, the local government’s operational system didn’t make it easy to serve residents. The Mobile County Commission faced many challenges with its homegrown payroll software and other legacy systems, including relying on a single individual for payroll information and system maintenance.
To simplify and modernize its processes, the Commission deployed Workday Financial Management in 2022; Workday HCM, Payroll, and Grants in July 2023, and Learning and Talent Optimization this year, transforming their operations and positioning them for future success.
The move to Workday’s cloud-based platform created notable improvements that have boosted employees’ ability to deliver effective governance. First, it decentralized and expanded knowledge across the Commission’s team, ensuring that no single individual holds critical information—and therefore boosting the government’s resilience and operational continuity. Next, the implementation streamlined HR and administrative processes such as time tracking, benefits enrollment, and expense reporting, so that employees can spend more time focusing on what matters: delivering services to residents.
Additionally, Workday’s comprehensive reporting and real-time data have significantly improved visibility across the Commission, fostering better communication and decision-making. And finally, the platform enhanced Mobile County’s data security through audit trails, role-based permissions, encryption, access controls, security certifications, and compliance reporting.
The move to Workday’s cloud-based platform created notable improvements that have boosted employees’ ability to deliver effective governance.
After being constrained by outdated systems for two decades, “it’s a day and night transformation” for Mobile County, says Anusha Sai Paila-Bauer, the Commission’s IT director. With a modern platform, improved efficiency, and enhanced transparency, Mobile County is well-positioned to serve its citizens well into the future.
Washington State University’s commitment to research has already earned the institution a prestigious “R1” classification from the Carnegie Foundation—but university leaders aren’t stopping there. To improve the university’s ranking among major research universities and advance a modern research strategy, WSU needed to trade its 40-year-old legacy system for a more agile solution.
After going live on Workday HCM and Payroll and Workday Finance over the course of a few weeks in December 2020 and January 2021, WSU added Workday Adaptive Planning two years later—and quickly saw that its forecasting and scenario planning could also improve the university’s research grant management.
At the time, WSU relied on custom-tailored spreadsheets and costly shadow systems; the team didn’t have a decision-support software tool that could answer common questions such as, “Do I have room in the budget to hire another grad student?” or “How will this large equipment purchase impact our burn rate?” To make the most out of their funding, WSU researchers needed a solution that not only enabled them to review grant transactions and available balances, but also allowed them to plan for the effective management of their grants.
The university partnered with Deloitte to create a forecasting solution within Workday Adaptive Planning that enabled researchers and administrators to forecast grant spending, including salary and benefits by employee, as well as non-personnel costs, and the ability to accurately forecast facilities administration costs.
Today, WSU’s grant solution has rolled out to more than 900 employees who serve as the grants’ principal investigators and administrators, giving this broad audience access to forecasting capabilities for the first time. Its benefits were immediately recognized by new users, prompting additional requests for similar tools that could manage other non-grant university funding sources.
Most importantly, WSU’s improved data access and efficiency ensures that university personnel get the most out of their grants, furthering scientific knowledge and ensuring that the university can continue to embrace opportunities to solve the world’s toughest problems.
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