We’re delighted to celebrate retail and hospitality customers who move their business forward by innovating on the Workday platform to create great experiences for their employees and customers. Read on to learn this year’s category winners for the Workday Industry Innovation Awards.
Our Workday customers fill us with inspiration by their resourcefulness, innovation, and creativity, and we’re proud to call them our partners. This partnership leads to solutions and problem-solving that contribute to positive changes for employees and customers.
Retail and hospitality companies continue to set a high bar for innovation, and it was a great honor to present our second annual Retail and Hospitality Innovation Awards in Las Vegas at Workday Rising, our flagship customer event.
And now, let’s reveal this year’s award winners!
Collaboration Champion Award: Target
The Collaboration Champion Award recognizes retail and hospitality customers who demonstrate the Workday community spirit by consistently promoting the sharing of ideas and solutions, helping to build a more active and engaged customer community.
Target’s goal was to elevate the team member experience and improve HR service delivery. The company recognized the importance of mobile accessibility for the workforce and actively collaborated with Workday to ensure a consistent Help Center experience across desktop and mobile platforms. This user-centric focus led to improved self-service and reduced support case volume.
Target leveraged Workday tools like Prism Analytics to analyze its HR case volumes, types of employee searches and knowledge article interactions to gain valuable insights into team members’ challenges. This data-driven approach allows for targeted improvements in applications, processes, and knowledge resources, ultimately enhancing the overall experience.
By combining Workday Extend, Workday Orchestrate, APIs, and Workday Help, Target automated previously manual transaction processes. This innovation not only saves time for both the support team and the submitters but also provides insights into cases where automation isn’t possible, allowing for further process refinement.
Process Innovation Award: Lowe’s
The Process Innovation Award celebrates retail and hospitality customers who’ve shown creativity and innovation using Workday functionality to solve a specific retail and hospitality regulatory, business, or industry-specific need, resulting in a measurable return on investment to the organization.
Lowe’s embraced the latest innovations from Workday, being an early adopter of Workday Extend and the second customer to go live with Workday Orchestrate. The company provides an inspirational example of using new technology for business transformation.
Lowe’s not only partnered with Workday Professional Services but also developed several integrations in-house using Workday Orchestrate. This showcased the company’s technical capability and commitment to maximizing the benefits of the new technology.
By adopting Workday Orchestrate, Lowe’s achieved a 30% reduction in integration creation effort and saw performance improvements of up to 50% or more. These tangible benefits highlight the project’s transformative impact on company operations.
Trailblazer Award: P.F. Chang’s
The Trailblazer Award recognizes retail and hospitality customers for taking a pioneering step in their use of Workday. These customers are often some of the first to deploy a new solution, such as members of design groups and early adopter forums, along with those who have used a product to create something new to better support their organization.
P.F. Chang’s embraced a holistic approach, integrating HR, operations, finance, and IT onto a single Workday platform. This eliminated data silos and created a real-time, unified view of organizational data, enabling more informed and agile decision-making.
The company leveraged machine learning to optimize scheduling, significantly improving talent retention rates. It was also an early adopter of labor demand forecasting. This proactive approach demonstrates a commitment to harnessing technology to address operational challenges.
P.F. Chang’s prioritized employee experience by providing mobile self-service options for managing payslips, setting schedules, and participating in training. This empowerment fosters engagement and contributes to a positive work environment.
Platform Rockstar Award: Drury Hotels
The Platform Rockstar Award recognizes customers who use a combination of Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Financial Management to drive digital transformation and business effectiveness.
Drury Hotels took a comprehensive approach to unifying human capital and financial operations, leveraging the Workday platform to establish a seamless flow of information across departments.
The company’s innovative approach to implementation—engaging employees at all levels from the start and incorporating their feedback to customize training and support systems—fostered higher adoption rates and user satisfaction.
Drury improved security by consolidating disparate systems and streamlining supply ordering for 140 hotel teams, facilitating improved collaboration between IT and finance teams, and empowering managers and frontline workers with mobile access to information and decision-making.
By leveraging real-time data to anticipate trends and address potential issues proactively, Drury shifted from reactive to proactive management. This innovative approach positions the company as a leader in leveraging technology for organizational transformation. As Drury’s chief information officer puts it, “The biggest value that we’ve seen with Workday is that it’s a modern platform that helps us be more efficient so we can work smarter, faster, and better.”
Congratulations to all our Retail and Hospitality Innovation Award winners! We appreciate your collaborative spirit and continuous innovation on the Workday platform, and we can’t wait to see all the amazing work you’ll do in the future.
Learn how restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s has risen above industry challenges thanks to its innovative approach to talent and technology.
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