We’re delighted to celebrate retail and hospitality customers who consistently find solutions to problems and create great experiences for their employees and customers. Read on to learn this year’s category winners for the Workday Industry Innovation Awards.
At Workday, our customers inspire us each day with their spirit of creativity, innovation, and resourcefulness. And it’s incredible to see how in partnership with Workday, they apply that spirit to approaching challenges and building new solutions that make all the difference for their customers and employees.
Companies in the retail and hospitality industries needed to be especially innovative to survive and thrive the last few years, as they’ve weathered wave after wave of disruption. So, it was a special honor to present our annual Retail and Hospitality Innovation Awards in San Francisco at Workday Rising, our flagship customer event.
So without further ado, let’s open the envelopes and reveal the winners.
The Digital Transformation Award highlights the use of Workday solutions and technologies by retail and hospitality customers to digitally transform operations instead of merely improving existing IT infrastructure, business practices, or processes.
This year’s winner, Innisfree Hotels, is recognized for transforming its nightly auditor process (processing guest payments, reconciling cash, balancing reports, and preparing invoices for the next day) from a cumbersome, disparate approach into a singular and familiar Workday application with Workday Extend, Workday Prism Analytics, and Workday Accounting Center.
This gave Innisfree Hotels the ability to maintain mapping and custom transformation, and keep the entire process in-house. The solution also provides “infinite” extendibility with 100% data ownership, providing the hospitality company complete control over data, mapping, and bank reconciliation groups.
Another key outcome for Innisfree Hotels is the ability to report on its data exactly how leaders want, in reports, dashboards, discovery boards, and Workday Adaptive Planning. Through this project, they moved the entire process to Workday, eliminating the need for third-party credentials, making “one-click” approvals by property managers possible, and making their data much more available and accessible through native reporting in Workday.
The Collaboration Champion Award recognizes retail and hospitality industry customers that have demonstrated the spirit of the Workday Community by consistently promoting the exchange of ideas, sharing solutions, and helping to build a more active and engaged customer community.
McKee Foods has created a culture of positive collaboration built on its core values of being innovative, respectful, and intentional. This collaboration helps drive mutual and collective value for McKee stakeholders, from its customers and peers to the Workday product team, much of it through a culture of “brainstorms” on Workday Community.
Through this spirit of knowledge-sharing, Workday customers can find solutions more easily and make progress toward those solutions. At McKee, the belief that the community belongs to everyone fosters an environment of mutual respect between McKee and Workday. It also helps the team identify gaps and requirements, and build successful relationships and partnerships as the product roadmap evolves.
And a very special “shout out” goes to Floyd Walterhouse, McKee’s IT group manager. Floyd is a long-time friend of Workday, and has attended nearly every Workday Rising since the first event in 2007. Floyd is one of the Top Collaborators on Workday Community, and has received over 77,000 “kudos” from community collaborators. Known for his incredibly gifted mind for process improvement, he’s been involved in thousands of brainstorms and solutions. Thank you, Floyd!
The Process Innovation Award celebrates retail and hospitality industry customers who have 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.
Couche-Tard/Circle K is recognized for its innovative work with a new Workday Extend app for the New Change Job and Requisition Management process to more effectively meet the needs of their unique Retail business model. By only showing the necessary fields required for the specific transaction, the solution helps managers create and organize requisitions by combining multiple functions onto one screen. Now the process is simpler and faster through segmenting the transaction into specific uses like promotion and transfer.
At Workday, our customers inspire us each day with their spirit of creativity and resourcefulness as they find innovative solutions and create efficiencies for their customers and employees.
The Trailblazer Award recognizes retail and hospitality industry customers for taking a pioneering step in their use of Workday. These customers are often one 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.
Panera Bread uses the full power of Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management to support their current and emerging business needs in the restaurant industry. And through this long standing partnership, Panera Bread has applied creative thinking in multiple areas to drive efficiency and innovation.
One area is payroll automation of “off cycle” payments and retro calculations. In the past, managers had to complete manual forms if time tracking adjustments were missed, salary changes were late, or additional pay was needed. By bringing point-of-sales data into Workday time tracking in real time, the team automated the process to enable daily off cycle payments and retro payments. This created more flexibility for managers and associates, and reduced processing time and labor costs within payroll.
Another example is the use of Workday’s mobile app on iPads in the cafe by managers. Managers now have data at their fingertips and can approve time off, transfer associates within cafes, manage labor costs, and drill down into their cafe’s P&L, all while staying visible and accessible to customers and associates.
Congratulations to all our Retail and Hospitality Innovation Award winners! We appreciate your collaborative spirit and continuous innovation on the Workday Enterprise Management Cloud, and we can’t wait to see all the amazing work you’ll do in the future.
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