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This is The Possibility Perspective.
The show where we peel back the layers on enhancing enterprise solutions with Workday magic and PeopleSoft innovation. We’ll sit with real-time customers who've participated in our tailored services.
Whether you're eyeing a smooth Workday transition or modernizing your PeopleSoft with the power of Amazon’s public cloud (AWS), we've got you covered. We’ll dive into topics from cloud migrations to fluid user experiences.
Tune in and empower yourself with the knowledge to optimize your enterprise solutions.
Ginger Harris [00:00:00]:
Something else that we appreciate about ERPA is their approach to incoming requests. So the requests are assigned to a resource very, very quickly. I don't think that we've seen a request take more than a day to be assigned. Then ERPA takes a look at that request, reviews our tenant configuration, and always, always offers to connect to discuss the proposed solution.
Jeff Miller [00:00:27]:
Hello friends, I'm Jeff Miller from ERPA and you're listening to The Possibility Perspective, the show where we talk to strategic-minded workday customers who partner with ERPA for a better Workday experience
Jeff Miller [00:00:42]:
Higher education has its own unique challenges and Workday has solutions for nearly all of them. Today we're discovering how Kansas City University's Workday journey has led them to a near nirvana experience through the Power of One. And joining us is Ginger Harris, Director of Workday and Business Process Support at Kansas City University. Ginger will share insights into how higher education institutions like KCU are staying on the cutting edge of technology to serve those who will tolerate nothing less that is today's university students. She'll also walk us through how workday as your unified single system can transform your processes and workflows, providing unparalleled visibility to everyone who needs it. And throughout our conversation, Ginger will discuss how a workday support partner like ERPA can free up time for your internal team to focus on bigger projects, long-term transformation and future big-picture thinking. We talk about all of that and more, so let's dive in.
Jeff Miller [00:01:43]:
So Ginger, why don't you start off.
Jeff Miller [00:01:46]:
By telling us a little bit about yourself and the institution that you work for, including your employee and student count.
Ginger Harris [00:01:53]:
So my name is Ginger Harris. I am the Director of Workday and Business Process Support and I lead Kansas City University's Centralized Workday Support team. I've worked for KCU for five years and also have five years of workday support experience at KCU. We have a total of seven people on our Workday support team who are responsible for Workday platform configuration and governance for the university, including things like report writing, integrations and security. We have two analysts focused on HCM and financials and three analysts focused on supporting workday student so Kansas City University has two campus locations in Missouri, one in Kansas City, go Chiefs, and the other in Joplin. KC was established in 1916 as a college of Osteopathic Medicine and we are currently the largest medical school in Missouri today. We also have programs for biosciences, clinical psychology and dental medicine. We have just over 2000 students and 400 full-time employees with a total employee headcount of just under 800.
Jeff Miller [00:03:15]:
Awesome. You gave us a lot of information there. I love that. And a lot of things I didn't know about the history of KCU. Fantastic. And yes indeed, go Chiefs. That's really cool.
Jeff Miller [00:03:25]:
Now you mentioned HCM and financials. You also mentioned Student. You're a platform Workday customer. When did you initially go live with Workday and then when did you add Student and then if you wouldn't mind, tell us a little bit about your Workday journey so far.
Ginger Harris [00:03:39]:
KCU went live with HCM in 2015 and financial management in 2016. Now I was hired by KCU in 2019. At the very beginning of the student implementation. We went live with Workday student admissions in 2020 and student records, student financials and financial aid in 2021. Implementing Workday Student during the pandemic was interesting because we started with in-person design sessions and had to quickly adjust and pivot our implementation plan to remote support and collaboration. We continued our Workday journey with PRISM analytics and grants management in 2013 and finally added Workday extend. This year we have eight PRISM projects live and two more currently in development. We also have two Workday extend applications deployed.
Ginger Harris [00:04:34]:
We're really, really excited about that and we continue to explore additional Workday services and modules to continuously improve our operations and support.
Jeff Miller [00:04:45]:
Love it.
Jeff Miller [00:04:46]:
You have HCM and financials in that order and then you added Student. Now I'm imagining adding Workday Student had to be pretty transformational for KCU. I'm wondering, so a student was managed under a different System prior to 2020 when you added it, what difference has it made now that you have it all in one system?
Ginger Harris [00:05:07]:
It really has been transformational. Prior to going live with Workday Student, we used PowerFAIDS for financial aid and PowerCampus for student records. We'd use the same system for more than 30 years. And having everything in the same system has been transformational due to Workday's power of one. So before Workday our systems were siloed and teams were disconnected. Even though the processes in one system had an impact on another system. Today we truly benefit from everything being in one system where the downstream impacts of a change are clear and evident. So an example of that would be student cohort and class enrollment impacting financial aid eligibility and student billing.
Ginger Harris [00:05:56]:
We've done a great job of improving the level of collaboration and understanding across teams by regularly discussing these cross-functional processes within Workday that have this downstream impact. Those conversations weren't necessarily being had before when our systems were siloed, you know.
Jeff Miller [00:06:18]:
You talk about it being transformational for those who are yet to move to Workday and they hear that system of one. It might sound a little high in the sky, Pollyanna, like too good to be true, but once you've experienced that, that power of one, where everything is there, one dashboard, one system, one downstream effect, and the systems are communicating native to one another, it really is a difference maker. And I'm happy that you've made that full transition now so that you've got everything in one system, really.
Ginger Harris [00:06:50]:
Yeah, it's. It's almost like pulling back the covers on what your processes really are and, and diving in to get into the specifics and understanding end-to-end, what the impact is of a change.
Jeff Miller [00:07:04]:
That's right. I love it. That's great, great story. Now, you had a workday support partner prior to ERPA, so I want to turn to that story a little bit. What led you to realize that you needed a change and then why ERPA?
Ginger Harris [00:07:20]:
So we had two primary pain points that prompted us to look for another partnership. One was the limited availability of integration support. So we have a centralized workday support team, but we rely primarily on third-party support or support from our internal IT team for studio integration integrations. Specifically, we have several Studio integrations to support. A lot of those are within the student module of Workday and our processes are highly dependent upon them. We have some internal resource constraints and our previous partner seemed to experience similar resource constraints because the runway for integration support was 30 days on many occasions. And that lead time for integration support made it difficult for us to be agile and responsive to requests for integration changes or improvements. So that was one thing.
Ginger Harris [00:08:19]:
The second pain point was that we really were seeking to find a partner to meet us where we are. Many third-party support companies are geared more towards a customer who has just gone live with Workday. Many of our analysts have more than five years of experience configuring and supporting workday in some capacity. So we have sufficient in-house skills to handle quite a few things ourselves. Things like annual benefits, open enrollment and student program changes, or creating nonstudio integrations, or configuring payroll. Those are all things that we're able to handle in-house. So we were seeking a partnership to really help us get to that next level and teach us along the way and take us with them rather than simply doing the work for us. So we love that when we open a ticket with ERPA support, we have the choice of selecting whether we want the work, complete it on our behalf.
Ginger Harris [00:09:17]:
Or if we want to be shown how to do something. ERPA has truly been able to meet us where we are and tailor that level of support to meet our specific needs.
Jeff Miller [00:09:29]:
Love that. And that's an interesting insight and observation that you made that a lot of the support partners out there in the ecosystem kind of specialize in that post-go-live stabilization phase rather than maybe the more mature customer who's been on Workday for a while and needs a little bit more of a mature support model. That's really interesting. You mentioned earlier the Extend project. Let's dig into that just a little bit more. Your relationship with ERPA and start in fact started with that Extend project.
Jeff Miller [00:10:02]:
Can you tell us a little bit more about the project and how ERPA was involved? What was the outcome as well?
Ginger Harris [00:10:08]:
One of my favorite things to talk about because I feel like it was such a win for KCU. So we were seeking a more streamlined solution for a contract request submission and review process and connecting the applicable downstream finance processes to create a more cohesive swim lane for contract processing. Now these are primarily legal contracts that have a financial aspect tied to them. So prior to our Extend project, many workday customers will be familiar with request framework. We use request framework for contract submission. The request would route the contract through finance, legal and other approval steps and then once it was approved, the contract would have to leave Workday for signature. Then once it was signed it would be emailed to finance or the requester to create the appropriate like financial processes, things like a supplier contract in the workday system or a purchase requisition. So there was a lot of communication taking place outside of Workday.
Ginger Harris [00:11:09]:
With so many steps being done outside of Workday, it wasn't easy for anyone to see the status of that contract, especially the person who submitted it. And sometimes those contracts are pretty time sensitive. So knowing where it was in the process was really important. So the other issue was that a request process doesn't allow the request to be edited by anyone other than the initiator. So it was impossible to add information to that request throughout the process and if corrections were needed we'd have to send it all the way back to the initiator. It just just wasn't a good process overall. So we had this idea to leverage Extend to create an end-to-end processing hub for our contracts and ERPA helped us create an application that helped us do that. So we streamlined our intake form and our new process allows information to be added at specific times throughout the review process.
Ginger Harris [00:12:11]:
That has reduced the frequency of sendbacks and really puts the responsibility for adding that information on the people who are the experts for whatever that information may be. So, for example, we have finance adding a spend category. Our submitters aren't responsible for that. It also has allowed us to kick off those downstream finance processes from within Workday, so we don't have to email the contract outside of Workday anymore and ask that those processes be manually initiated within Workday. I feel like we had a pretty ambitious vision for the application, and ERPA was the only partner of those that we vetted that told us that they could deliver on those downstream processes within extend. And they delivered. It's been great.
Jeff Miller [00:12:57]:
Love the detail. Thank you for sharing all of that detail. And I can almost imagine our audience nodding and understanding of having to start something in Workday, pull it out of Workday, not being able to track where it is in the process, put it back into Workday, but then also a limited number of people having the ability to make changes during the process. I. I can just sense there's nodding of heads, of pain, of everybody recognizing a familiar situation that they're in. So I appreciate the detail that you gave us in the pain that you were experiencing, the very specific problem that you wanted solved, and then obviously the solution that came about. Thank you for that. Now, you've mentioned the word agility already.
Jeff Miller [00:13:40]:
On our call together, one of our four core values at ERPA is agility. Are there any examples of flexibility or agility that you've seen from ERPA that have helped you?
Ginger Harris [00:13:54]:
That's an excellent question, and one example immediately stands out in my mind. So we attended Workday Rising, and at Workday Rising, we had the pleasure of meeting many members of our ERPA support team in person. But unfortunately, and I think it was early in Rising, maybe Tuesday, we had an unexpected issue arise in the middle of the day, and while in between sessions, I was able to triage the issue, but I knew that our named contact that I would need to correct the issue was also at Rising. So I didn't really have high hopes that anything could be done until Rising was over. But the issue was corrected that evening, even though our name support contact with ERPA wasn't Rising and, you know, had all of the Rising sessions and Rising events to attend made us a priority. And that really stands out in my mind that ERPA was so committed to helping us correct the issue so quickly.
Jeff Miller [00:15:05]:
What a great example. Yeah. Even during Workday Rising, Workday support still has to take place. And so it's interesting you knew that your named contact was at Workday Rising because you saw them there. And yet, hey, workday support still has to take place, even during a big conference like that.
Jeff Miller [00:15:24]:
Great example.
Jeff Miller [00:15:25]:
Appreciate that. Now, ERPA's AMS support for KCU is strongly related to workday student support. So in layman's terms, Ginger, could you tell us what does ERPA do for you as it relates to SIS or Student Information System, your student module?
Ginger Harris [00:15:45]:
Yeah, I can give a couple of examples. First is probably to investigate issues that we are unsuccessful in troubleshooting ourselves. So things like student engagement messages not sending or student charges not being dropped when a student is unregistered from a course. The other is enhancement to current functionality. So we recently partnered with ERPA to implement customer invoicing within workday for our student sponsorship. Prior to that configuration of that process and workday, someone on our student finance team would have to manually create these invoices in Excel. It was a time-consuming process that took hours each month. Now, through a document layout that ERPA helped us create, along with a report that pulls that data into the invoice from Workday, we can seamlessly get those issued in much less time each month.
Ginger Harris [00:16:48]:
And it's been really transformational for that student finance team.
Jeff Miller [00:16:52]:
It's really what every Workday customer should be doing is you're looking at what are the manual processes that we would like to do away with and automate instead to streamline the process in order to free up our very valuable treasured employees to do more value-added work. And that's more rewarding for them anyway. And so I applaud you for constantly thinking about what are the pain points that we're experiencing and even though what is possible with workday, what can be automated with Workday and then how to get it achieved.
Ginger Harris [00:17:26]:
Yeah, and quite honestly, that's a lot of what a Workday support team does, whether it be our internal team or ERPA is talking to those functional teams about what their processes are and coming to them with ideas for how we can, how Workday can, and we can help them create more opportunity for those value add activities leveraging the system. Sometimes it's explaining something that they didn't even know was possible.
Jeff Miller [00:18:01]:
Exactly. Well, you're doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And that's. I applaud you again for that. Now, let's talk about integrations for a moment. IC subject ERPA has a unique warranty that we offer when we build an integration or when we audit existing integrations for Workday Customers Now. ERPA recently conducted an integrations audit for KCU. Can you talk about that process as well as what you discovered through the process?
Ginger Harris [00:18:33]:
Man, the things that happen behind the curtain. We created a list of about 50 integrations for ERPA to review for us. Some of those integrations had been in place since we went live with Workday back in 2015, and in some cases our internal support team. We didn't have good understanding of how those integrations worked or what exactly they were doing or why we needed them. We'd had an integration review project on our project roadmap for several years, but couldn't seem to prioritize it against other high-priority projects. ERPA was able to provide details on what those integrations were doing and provide recommendations for how to optimize them. So, for example, we were able to identify opportunities to leverage report reports in lieu of complex connector integrations that we really couldn't tailor to meet our needs. We'd be much more easily able to tailor those reports to our specific needs.
Ginger Harris [00:19:46]:
ERPA also found some templates for us that needed to be updated, which helped us avoid integration failures in the future. When those old templates were deprecated, then the findings were presented to us in a format that was easy to follow and provided advice for which integrations we really needed to address first, which ones were high risk, as well as those optimization updates that could be done at a later time.
Jeff Miller [00:20:13]:
Awesome. So good. So for anyone who's listening, you've got those old rusty integrations or perhaps many customers. The employees inherit the workday instance from previous employees and they really don't have the documentation or the visibility into what those early, earlier integrations did. And integrations audit is a valuable thing and something worth doing because of the discoveries that you'll make along the way. Thank you for that, Ginger. So you had mentioned earlier identifying certain manual processes that you wanted automated and working with ERPA as your partner to get those things automated. Kind of a follow-up question there.
Jeff Miller [00:20:51]:
Has engaging with ERPA opened up anything for you and your team in terms of, for example, more time for bigger projects or for future thinking or long-term transformation or something else?
Ginger Harris [00:21:07]:
I think I would say all of those things. So partnering with ERPA has helped our team uphold our commitment to service to our internal customers. We're able to better prioritize requests that come into us, knowing that we have a partner who will help us and do so in, you know, a timely manner. ERPA again, is great about meeting us where we are, which enables us to learn while our requests are completed, helping us better handle those requests internally in the future. I would say that we've also been able to tackle larger projects internally, knowing that we have a partner by our side who can assist us if something urgent comes up while our internal resources are working on projects. Without a reliable partner, we would either have to outsource projects or they would of course take longer to finish. We were able to configure, test and deploy benefits open enrollment this year while adding three new benefit plan offerings in house without lengthening our response time to other requests, and simultaneously developing partnering with ERPA to develop those student sponsor invoices with ERPA support. So both those projects represent a significant time commitment for our internal support team.
Ginger Harris [00:22:21]:
But we were able to get it done because of our partnership with erpa and going back to that, you know, offering the functional teams advice or suggestions for how things might be done differently. We really strive to be an internal consultant for our teams to help them get to the next level. And having a partner that can help us triage issues and help us do these next-level projects has really been transformational in helping us keep that consulting commitment to our internal team.
Jeff Miller [00:23:02]:
Now, you've mentioned your internal rock stars a few times. You've got some sophisticated workday expertise internal at KCU. You've got your own resources that really do know Workday. So he also mentioned the ticketing system with the ERPA and the and the options that it offers you. So how do you determine, Ginger, what to do yourself as KCU workday experts versus what to rely on a partner like ERPA to do on your behalf?
Ginger Harris [00:23:32]:
That's a great question, and it depends. So our functional teams submit requests to us on a very regular basis. We have them indicate on those requests what the priority is and give us a requested completion date, which helps us prioritize them. We usually have around 60 ticket requests in flight at any given time, so there are a lot of moving parts and a lot of discussions happening. We meet with each functional team on a minimum of a monthly basis to talk about those requests and discuss and prioritize them between those meetings. We really strive to get all of those requests completed and we then discuss resource assignments amongst our team. So we identify anything that could require additional support to complete those things that we feel like we can't quite get across our finish line ourselves or those that prevent or present an opportunity to learn from ERPA. We feel like those opportunities are our best use cases for those support resources.
Ginger Harris [00:24:46]:
If those opportunities don't exist Then we pivot and leverage our support hours with ERPA to help us with overflow, to make sure that we're getting those priorities completed timely and maintaining that level of service.
Jeff Miller [00:25:02]:
So a big part of it is the prioritization. You agree on your priorities and then figure out what can you do internally versus what can you rely on ERPA to do on your behalf in order to achieve the priorities that you've identified. So one of our I think uniquenesses as a workday support partner are these named resources. And we've talked a little bit about this. Even you meeting your quote, team at Workday, rising in person and knowing exactly who the person was who was going to be working on a project that you needed accomplished urgently. Can you speak to the importance of named contacts at ERPA who have knowledge of your tenant configuration history of your conversations in their mind, as opposed to perhaps a more traditional support model where your ticket goes to the next available stranger? Can you talk about that value of the Named, your team, your Named resources?
Ginger Harris [00:25:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. So our previous partner, we didn't have the luxury of name support contacts and those that team that was really dedicated to us. So this is something that has been new for us. But having an assigned team is great. So members of our assigned support team have already developed, we've already developed an expectation of reliability amongst our team. So as we're talking about those prioritizations of those ticket requests, you know, it might come up and say, well, we know that John, with ERPA can, can help us with that. We've had the opportunity to meet each member and work with them on previous tickets. So we know what they can deliver.
Ginger Harris [00:26:47]:
And I expect that knowledge base and familiarity with our processes to only increase over time. Right. It's like compound returns. We've seen outstanding support as a result of the retained knowledge in the areas of revisions to our extend application. We tried from the start to get all of the requests in from end users for that. But inevitably as we start processing those contract requests, some minor change requests come up. But that's same team that built the application for us is also supporting us in AMS as well. So we've, and we've seen the same benefit for integrations because the same resource who did our integration warranties is also supporting us through AMS.
Jeff Miller [00:27:34]:
Love that familiarity there and the relationship that you're developing with still a relatively new partnership between KCU and ERPA. And like you said, the compound benefit of a very optimistic future for this partnership. Ginger, thank you so much for all of the great things that you have said about our partnership together. Is there anything else that you want to add? Anything that perhaps came to mind but you didn't have an opportunity to say it in answer to any of my questions?
Ginger Harris [00:28:05]:
Yeah. So I think, just as a final thought, something else that we appreciate about ERPA is their approach to incoming requests. So the requests are assigned to a resource very, very quickly. I don't think that we've seen a request take more than a day to be assigned. Then ERPA takes a look at that request, reviews our tenant configuration, and always, always offers to connect to discuss the proposed solution. So communicating through more than just comments on a ticket and adding that personalized touch creates better communication opportunity and the opportunity for knowledge transfer and questions for things that maybe didn't come up when we were putting in the ticket with our previous support partner. That level of service wasn't quite there and the result was an increase in the back and forth in conversations in the ticket. Or maybe we missed something.
Ginger Harris [00:29:06]:
But that touch base and talking about that solution and showing us really benefits both sides and creates a better understanding. It eliminates assumptions, no doubt.
Jeff Miller [00:29:19]:
Well, this conversation has made me even more optimistic about the future of our partnership. So thank you so much for this great conversation and look forward to our ongoing partnership. Very good stuff. Thanks for listening to the possibility perspective. If you'd like to talk to ERPA about what's next in your Workday journey, be sure to visit erpa.com.