In Brief
A financial services holding company with nearly $8 billion in assets, more than 60 regional banks, and several insurance and wealth management agencies under its umbrella collaborated with Huron to implement Workday Adaptive Planning as a replacement for a sunsetting legacy tool.
Challenge
The company was in the process of consolidating its four bank charters into one single bank entity. The combination of the four charters was expected to deliver operational efficiency while also enabling greater financial flexibility and competitiveness in the market.
At the same time, the organization’s legacy financial planning and analysis (FP&A) tool was being sunsetted, so leaders were looking for an alternative that would not only replace the functionality of the existing solution but help them to modernize their systems and processes.
To facilitate this consolidation and future-proof their finance and accounting functions, the organization’s leaders understood they would need to align around a standardized digital ecosystem that would support the enterprisewide simplification and optimization they were aiming to realize.
There was also an organizational push to define a clear strategy for fully utilizing existing employee skill sets and understanding future workforce needs in light of the modernization of the company’s technology infrastructure.
Approach
Huron was selected to help the business review its organizational structure, finance business processes, and chart of accounts in preparation for the adoption of technology to support its financial, strategic planning, and human resources functions.
The project consisted of three phases:
- Examining the current state of the organization
- Modeling the organization’s desired future state
- Planning a strategic road map for the organization’s long-term digital transformation journey
The 3-Phase Approach
|
Examine Current State |
Model Future State |
Plan and Road Map |
The first step in the process involved an enterprisewide evaluation geared toward providing necessary inputs to outline a plan for the company’s digital transformation journey. More than 30 assessment workshop sessions were conducted with business functional groups, touching on organizational pain points, limitations, challenges, and optimal solutions.
Results from the assessment were used to help leaders envision and model the organization’s desired future state. This planning-first approach ensured the organization took intentional, strategic steps that would help it achieve its desired outcomes.
At the conclusion of the first two phases, the company’s leadership team elected to deploy Huron’s proprietary bank margin planning accelerator along with Workday Adaptive Planning. Workday Adaptive Planning’s powerful modeling and automation capabilities help organizations make better, quicker decisions using more accurate, accessible data.
Huron’s implementation team helped outline a plan to redesign the operating model, adopt a future-state system architecture, maintain regulatory reporting and compliance, and enhance upskilling practices for current employees. This third phase mapped out five primary goals for the company’s digital transformation:
- Establish formal data governance.
- Develop a reporting organization scaled to incorporate the entire enterprise.
- Implement processes for financial data usage.
- Ensure business continuity through easy access to financial information.
- Transform the organization’s approach to talent management via career frameworks, upskilling, gap analyses, collaboration, and retention.
Over the long term, the company is planning to implement additional Workday solutions to further enhance its finance architecture. The next phase of its journey will be focused on the execution of the plans the organization has put in place thus far. Ultimately, leaders want to achieve their ideal operating model and have the organization be seen as a digital leader in its space.