Aurecon has committed to a five-year strategic partnership with Workday that will see it create a roadmap for evolving a system that is used for both enterprise resource planning and HR.
Chief information officer Carl Duckinson told Digital Nation that Workday is “the core or the centre of our universe” for finance and HR, with project coordination and management also on the cards.
The engineering, design and advisory company has used Workday HCM for HR since 2015.
It then expanded Workday to run finance, underpinning a finance transformation and setting up a single standard ERP system and processes across the business.
It previously had two separate instances of BST, an ERP system intended for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industries.
The company is using both Workday FINS for financial management, and Workday professional services automation (PSA), which is marketed as “a single system to manage resources, projects, and financial data” for client-facing businesses.
Workday went live as Aurecon’s ERP in July 2021.
“I think for the first 12 or 18 months after go-live, it was really [about us] getting used to a whole new set of processes,” Duckinson said.
It has since determined that it wants to grow and extend how Workday is used in finance and project management, in part to make use of the cadence of changes and new features being added to the platform by Workday over time.
“We’ve started to optimise the platform in the same way that we’ve done with HCM, so the finance function has uplifted its Workday capability,” Duckinson said.
That will now continue as a result of the five-year strategic partnership that Aurecon has struck with Workday.
“We typically renew software on a three-year basis, but we’ve been very happy with our relationship with Workday, so we’ve committed to what we consider a more strategic partnership by extending it to five years,” Duckinson said.
“We’ve included Workday success plans in that relationship, so we’ve uplifted the level of commitment on the Workday side, whilst also bolstering up the senior capability on the Aurecon side, so that we can come together and put a more strategic sort of roadmap together.
“The Workday success plan enables us to tap into workday at the right level and put together a joint strategy.”
One of the expansion areas on the roadmap is to make use of Workday Extend, a kind of low-code tool to ‘visually’ build apps that draw on – but also extend the value of – the foundational Workday systems.
With more functions operating on Workday, Extend provided opportunities “to really take advantage of that integrated platform and integrated data, and the ability to then put workflow or a better user experience over the top, to then get more value from” the investment.
Aurecon had been eyeing a resource management use case for Extend but determined that it had to pause that effort to get the entire organisation talking the same language and using the same tools when managing client projects.
Duckinson said Aurecon has around 3000 projects of various sizes on the go at any one time.
“We are about to put in a project controls platform that standardises or provides a curated set of processes [and project delivery tools] for our business to use, no matter whether they’re managing a small consulting engagement or a major capital delivery project or a major program of work,” he said.
“We will connect all of those [tools] with our CRM platform and our finance [and] HR platform, and then our data warehousing reporting platform, and then we’ll come back and look at resource management.”
Kate Weber attended the Workday Rising conference in Las Vegas as a guest of Workday.