Unleash the Potential of Your Workday Investment with AMS

When people think about application management services (AMS), they often only think about fixing defects in the system. While resolving defects is typically within the purview of AMS teams, it represents only a small portion of the value an AMS provider can bring. A proactive provider can help you get the most out of your investment in a cloud-based system like Workday—and they can often deliver a better level of service at a lower cost than a do-it-yourself approach.

The key to unlocking this value proposition lies in stretching beyond common misconceptions of AMS as strictly “ticket-fixers” and examining a provider’s offerings through a much broader, business-focused lens. Among other value-enhancing activities, a proactive AMS provider should be able to help you improve operational efficiency by maintaining and streamlining support, enhancing business capabilities by adopting new releases, and supporting growth by integrating mergers and acquisitions into Workday.

To ensure your technology is poised to shift and adapt at the pace of business change, Deloitte built our AMS offering for Workday on three pillars of value creation:

• Solve at the speed of X. We focus on helping you meet operational changes with an appropriate blend of technology and talent – specialist capabilities that are in demand, on-demand, and sustainable. To do this, we start by conducting a sustainment lab to help you understand what it takes to support Workday post go-live. Discussions often center upon: What kind of skills are necessary? What are the roles that are required and how many employees are needed to support Workday? And what kind of governance do you need to have in place? Once this understanding is established, we can help you choose an appropriate sourcing model that best meets the needs of your organization (e.g., co-sourcing versus 100% managed services). We can also manage Workday, wholly or in part, and identify ways to streamline and enhance the application by leveraging our global network of highly skilled practitioners as well as our strong relationship with Workday. Guided by our agile, outcome-based methodologies, our proactive approach to application management aims to eliminate issues before they arise, realize system value, and help you respond to market shifts through rapid uptake of Workday’s new features and functionalities.
• Operate to innovate. Operate organizations should have an innovation mindset that is focused on the continuous evolution of their Workday applications. The goal is to advance the organization’s capabilities to enhance the user experience, generate insights to reimagine businesses processes, manage costs, and inform talent and business decisions. For instance, your organization may have been live on Workday for years, but you’d like to get more value out of the investment. We might start by doing a health check, where we examine how the system is configured and make recommendations on ways to improve the employee experience, close the year-end books faster, or address some other challenge. Or, you may require merger and acquisition support or need to deploy another module, such as recruiting or benefits. Our AMS team can handle any project needed to take your organization to the next level.
• Move with confidence. Our multi-disciplinary capabilities can provide the perspective and depth of resources you need to see ahead. With the knowledge of our HCM and financial management practitioners, we can help you to reimagine, redesign, and re-architect your processes and systems to meet your business needs. This may involve helping you to understand your current state through integrated, transparent teamwork.  Or, it may entail engineering an HR or finance tech roadmap with benchmarks and great-fit solutions that tap our strong alliance relationships. Whatever it takes, we can help you move with confidence now and in the future.

Getting down to business

Many companies already have competent organizations with strong support capabilities. If you fall into this category, it raises the question: Why would you need AMS in the first place? In our experience, many clients fail to recognize that go live is day one. Very few companies—even those with highly mature support organizations—are fully benefiting from the new capabilities available in their robust Workday applications. All too often, companies limit themselves by narrowly viewing application management as a reactive service that just fixes issues as they arise. When viewed through a wider lens, our AMS team can be seen for what it really is—a way to anticipate and adapt to the new shape of business so you can stay ahead of the game.