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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.
[00:00:00] Shawn Fournier: How do we create a modern data-driven institution that's more efficient, secure, and responsive in a way that is really digestible for the institution? And that's really the goal here, right? Is to create an offer with Optima that is at a price point that can be justified, that is at a deployment scale that can be managed, and by the way, also creates an opportunity for additional modernization beyond ERP.
[00:00:24] Shawn Fournier: That's really what it's all about.
[00:00:27] Jeff Miller: Hello, friends. I'm Jeff Miller from ERPA and you're listening to The Possibility Perspective, the show where we talk to your strategic minded Workday customers who partner with ERPA for a better Workday experience. Thank you for joining ERPA and Workday today to learn about Workday and specifically Workday deployment, bringing Workday within reach for higher education institutions.
[00:00:52] Jeff Miller: Now all of you have heard of Workday, of course, briefly about ERPA. We support customers throughout their entire lifecycle on Workday with deployment services, application support, private to public cloud, tenant migration, and much more that we're gonna summarize later. But today. Well today it's all about your Workday journey from the very start, namely deployment for higher education.
[00:01:14] Jeff Miller: And what all of you will see here is, uh, what's in store for you today. First, our world class presenters are gonna say a quick introduction. Next, TJ will share how Workday is ideally suited to meet higher education needs. We'll then. Share a little bit about ERPA before getting into deployment methodology, the one we've called Optima by ERPA.
[00:01:35] Jeff Miller: Next, we're gonna explain Workday Plus, which is a holistic view of your IT landscape in search of undiscovered cost savings, as well as some quick success stories to show you how that works in particular. And then on the next slide, you will see our aforementioned world class presenters if they would go ahead and join me on camera.
[00:01:55] Jeff Miller: Welcome team. I would like for each of you to unmute yourself and then tell us a little bit about yourselves in the order of your pictures. From left to right ending with tj who is going to then take over and present to man. Why don't you start us off?
[00:02:09] Houman Immen: Sure. Welcome everybody. Thank you for your time. Uh, my name is Houman Immen,
[00:02:13] Houman Immen: I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at ERPA. I've been at ERPA for three and a half years plus, and in the Workday ecosystem since 2010. So it's really exciting to have the opportunity to talk about an innovative offering that we partner with Workday today that's geared towards smaller institutions. And Shawn.
[00:02:31] Houman Immen: Thank
[00:02:32] Shawn Fournier: you Amanda. And hello everyone. Thank you for joining. My name is Shawn Fournier. I am the VP of Alliances here at ERPA and really excited about the content that we'll be sharing with you this afternoon.
[00:02:41] Caroline Weir: Hi everybody. My name is Caroline Weir. Thank you for having us. I am the Workday Student Director here at ERP, so I head up the student delivery team.
[00:02:49] Caroline Weir: Been with ERPA for about 18 months and been in the Workday ecosystem since 2016, implementing student, and I've been in higher education for almost 25 years. Thank you.
[00:03:01] TJ Rains: Hey, good morning. Good afternoon. I'm TJ Rains. I serve as managing director for higher education at Workday, and I come to Workday with over 25 years of experience serving as CIO and Chief Transformation Officer in higher education, both public and private.
[00:03:14] TJ Rains: So excited to share your Workday's story with you and how we can really help, you know, with the help of ERPA, create a transformative journey for you. All right, great. Well, I'm gonna start things off, and this is our first title slide, but we're here to talk about how Workday is now within reach for higher education institutions.
[00:03:33] TJ Rains: So some of the significant challenges that we've seen over the last few years in working in higher education industry and working with CIOs. We do a survey every year to really get a good understanding of what are the current challenges and many institutions are. I have identified that rising operational costs, along with student expectations for that.
[00:03:51] TJ Rains: Personalized modern experience. And you know, the current challenges associated with the changing student demographic realities are really, really challenging The current operating model and with that priorities are shifting. And on the next slide we're gonna talk a little bit about what are those priorities.
[00:04:07] TJ Rains: So 90% of those respondents feel that they need to improve the overall student experience. In order to do so, they also need to improve their business processes within their organization to create an environment that is simple and streamlined for operational efficiency and meeting the experiential expectations of our students, faculty and staff, and doing so within a unified environment.
[00:04:33] TJ Rains: So some of the common questions that we hear out in the industry as we work with each institution that's interested in making the journey to Workday are really centered around having direct insights into their business, into their operations. So how can we make good decisions if we can't trust our data?
[00:04:48] TJ Rains: How can we streamline our internal and external reporting? How do we improve our planning and forecasting capabilities to ensure that we're agile in this changing space and all this? Tends to focus in on risk and how we can create new strategic initiatives that will maintain our relevance and continued success.
[00:05:06] TJ Rains: And so Workday provides a direct path to providing answers to these questions and helping institutions inno innovate for the future. Workday provides a predictive experience that is tailored to what your community expects that is delivered in a mobile first oriented frame. And then also, of course, the web-based experience is second to none, and our customers see significant improvements in their operational efficiencies and the ability to shift and adjust to the changing market demands as things change in this.
[00:05:38] TJ Rains: This highly changed oriented space that we are in today. And so 27% view and increase of engagement is being essential, and it has happened with our implementation. 30% see a reduction in people searches right within the system because data is brought forward. At the point when it's needed and the natural flow of work and faster time to completing approvals as well.
[00:06:01] TJ Rains: And so with this, Workday does provide just a significant improvement in business process efficiency, but it also creates an environment where you can continuously innovate and continuously improve the experience that your students or faculty and staff experience within their administrative environment.
[00:06:21] TJ Rains: So we've seen a significant amount of momentum over the last few years in particular, but one point I wouldn't wanna make, if you look down at the bottom, you'll see 2014, you got a little AI bubble there. We have been incorporating AI into the platform since 2014. I know there's been a lot of.
[00:06:38] TJ Rains: Conversation around artificial intelligence recently, generative AI and how it's impacting the student experience and the administrative experience. But we are really amping that up and we have built it from the core out, so I just wanna make that highlight there. But we've seen significant momentum in the higher education industry.
[00:06:54] TJ Rains: In particular, we're seeing, we have 650 higher education institutions and globally we were serving 19 countries. And that's continuing to grow as well. And these are just a smattering of key institutions that have made the decision to move to Workday, are either in the implementation cycle or have already launched and have a transformed environment today.
[00:07:14] TJ Rains: So not only do we have a strong customer base, and we also maintain a 95% customer satisfaction rate, which is amazing. And our customers are just, you know, a key component of our success in terms of being able to share the configuration capabilities, the challenges they've encountered operationally, and how Workday supported them in making a successful transformation.
[00:07:35] TJ Rains: But we also have. Recognition from Gartner and you know, we continue to make tremendous progress. You know, in terms of developing and delivering key capabilities. Gartner has has really identified a Workday as a key leader across all of these key areas, ERP planning, HCM, and student. And so we continue to innovate and those innovations are showing up, impacting our customers in a positive way, but also being validated by the external analyst community as well.
[00:08:05] TJ Rains: So Workday is an open platform. SaaS solutions of the past, they were more of a walled garden type of experience, right? It's difficult to get in. Once you're in, you have a great experience. That is not the case with Workday. Workday is not a walled garden. Embrace open standards and we are simplifying connectivity into and out.
[00:08:22] TJ Rains: Of Workday into other applications. We fully understand that Workday is not the only application within your portfolio, and we are here to ensure that you have a, an integration platform as well that is baked into the Workday platform to really drive governed at the source data integrations. So with that, you know, we have a strong core security, governance and privacy models that all of this is based upon.
[00:08:46] TJ Rains: We're not losing that. We're providing you with an additional set of capabilities to integrate from the source out. And so how does AI fit into the mix here? The future of work, from workplace perspective, after deep research and, and really understanding our client's needs and our. Our customer's needs.
[00:09:01] TJ Rains: We feel that the future of work is human and AI collaboration. It's a critical element here. And so what we feel is really the future for operational improvement in operations in higher education is providing, in essence, the AI capabilities that align with the human at the center, right, providing that human.
[00:09:21] TJ Rains: Employee to have more time to focus on the, the work that matters more one-on-one time with students, more strategic oriented conversations, because this change environment that we are all dealing with today, it's not slowing down. It's actually amping up. So having a AI companion, if you will, to really support improvement to cross.
[00:09:42] TJ Rains: Your operations all the way down to the individual. Micro efficiencies at each employee level is so essential these days. So the idea is that humans and AI work collaboratively to create efficiencies and to scale those efficiencies out as well. And all this is delivered through a modern conversational experience.
[00:09:59] TJ Rains: So we have, we've developed the Workday model and Workday assistant that will help to improve. The way in which our users experience Workday, and this is baked into the platform that will allow institutions to interact in a conversational mode that really, really drives improvements in, in terms of conversational flow.
[00:10:18] TJ Rains: Rather than having to hunt and peck for specific capabilities within their Workday environment, specific tasks, reports, et cetera. We have a conversational framework. That really helps bring agent capabilities forward and it really delivers a dynamic user experience. This is a core opportunity for smaller institutions who have often viewed Workday as being not an accessible platform due to cost constraints and whatnot.
[00:10:44] TJ Rains: And we have worked very closely with ERPA to really develop a new model that provides the reliability of the Workday platform and the security, the robustness, the continuous innovation that institutions need. To adopt new features and capabilities as they grow, as things change within this, this environment, Workday is now within reach, it's accessible to small and mid-size institution, and we're gonna talk through some of the key capabilities that ERPA Optima provides in helping institutions get across the finish line to the optimized reality.
[00:11:17] TJ Rains: So we've worked together to reimagine how Workday is delivered. This prescribed right size packaging and approach developed through all of our successful higher education implementations and continued innovations that we're making with their deep commitment to the higher education environment. And speed is very important.
[00:11:35] TJ Rains: You know, in, in a time where change is, is occurring on a daily basis due to a variety of different pressures, it's important that you're able to make these transitions in a very timely and resource effective way, enabling you to grow. And take advantage of your investment and our continuous innovation that's delivered through two updates per year and updates throughout the year as well to really provide additional capabilities that align with your strategic initiatives.
[00:12:02] TJ Rains: So we're very excited about the partnership that we have with the ERPA and bringing Workday to the small to midsize market in a very accessible form. And we're gonna talk through that at greater level of detail here in a moment. With that, I'll turn it back over. But thank you all so much for attending and yeah, looking forward to continue to sharing the story.
[00:12:23] Houman Immen: Thank you, tj. Appreciate you. So more about ERPA before we talk about Optima. Just a little bit about our history as an organization. We've been in business for 26 years. And we have done basically everything when it comes to managed services, strategic deployments. And on the next slide we will see some of the broad portfolio.
[00:12:45] Houman Immen: The offerings that we have, we have the 26 years primarily has been focused about 90% of our customers are in public sector in that period. And out of that 90%, 70% of them are in higher education. And we've done everything from the actual implementation of platforms like PeopleSoft, managing the needs for the customer.
[00:13:08] Houman Immen: But we've also done some exciting items as our customers move forward and empower them with the progress they needed by partnering with AWS and becoming an AWS partner. Shawn and I happen to be sitting in Las Vegas in different hotel rooms as we speak today at the AWS Reinvent Annual. Conference. So it's exciting to see the partnership and the focus they bring to the table for higher education.
[00:13:30] Houman Immen: And we've leveraged that to bring, uh, value to our institutions. And Shawn is gonna spend some more time and I will spend some more time telling you about some unique aspects for that complimenting our Workday deployments. So that story finally evolved to a point that we became a Workday partner, and it was the curiosity RPA always had around solving unique.
[00:13:49] Houman Immen: Problems for institutions with our current customers that Workday really listened to and got excited about and said, you know what? You need to be a Workday partner, because that curiosity needs to carry on with the innovation and the technology. Workday gives partners to be able to partner with Workday directly as we go ahead and modernize institutions, and here comes the Workday practice.
[00:14:09] Houman Immen: Five years into it, we've become a certified Workday partner, so we are one of the. Select few partners that implement higher education and government. And we also have been building a practice of managed services. So from our day one, our core DNA has been servicing customers before we became an official partner for net new institutions.
[00:14:28] Houman Immen: So we have lots of institutions and other industries that are using us for our expertise, and that's allowed us to really perfect and hone our support model and something that's very valuable in the Optima offering. And then as you move forward, we have really complimented our cloud strategy with AWS and tried to embed it into a strategy that works to bring the most value for any institution that's looking to implement Workday.
[00:14:52] Houman Immen: Maximizing the technology opportunities that AWS brings to us to accelerate the. And also leave you with a footprint as you grow. And then last but not least, when you look at our composition of our employees and anybody that is servicing the consultants, we've had eight years of experience in the Workday ecosystem, so we've gathered the best.
[00:15:12] Houman Immen: An average employee has eight years of experience deploying. Workday has five certification. What does that mean to you? They really understand the downstream impacts of what recommendations to make. They are Workday experts, and then when it comes down to the number of deployments they've actually been involved.
[00:15:28] Houman Immen: It's 20 plus when you average down our entire practice. We're also a Workday customer. We've been a Workday customer for several years, so we understand exactly how to use Workday. And last but not least, we're a built on Workday partner. It's all about innovation. Workday's had a very big initiative around the Clear Skies initiative that they call, which is really providing clarity to partners for the opportunities that exist outside of the work.
[00:15:52] Houman Immen: Day's own roadmap so we can pick and choose where we can invest in products. That curiosity that ERPA had really is complimentary here, where we can go pick and choose, and I'll give you some ideas around how we've used the Workday application to create a applications that are unique for unique purposes in higher education, specifically around the student area.
[00:16:11] Houman Immen: And last but not least, the AWS partnership is something we'll talk to you about. And of course I mentioned that 70% of our 90% of public sector customers are in higher ed. And this is a representation of all our customers, including Workday and non Workday that we've serviced over the years and are continuing to service.
[00:16:29] Houman Immen: We've had several Workday implementations in the past couple of years as we became an official Workday partner that are going live or have gone live. And several that are implementing Workday student or have gone live with Workday student. So those stories are near and dear to us as we are really looking to invest further with Optima.
[00:16:47] Houman Immen: So now Optima at its core. Really, it's very simple. On the next slide, I think what, what I'm gonna tell you about is really if one thing you can take outta this presentation is it's all about accelerating, as TJ said, time to value with a predictable fixed cost offering. With times that we're going through right now, we understand the pressure on institutions to really.
[00:17:06] Houman Immen: Pick a platform like Workday, but I'll understand what it costs to get it implemented and to make sure that it goes live on time and on budget. So it's organized, it's a package deployment, and it's very targeted in terms of the offering that we have. It's innovated using the latest technologies to simplify our efforts and your efforts.
[00:17:25] Houman Immen: And it's managed, meaning that once the go live happens, which we actually refer to as an activation, we're not going anywhere. We continue to stay with you. So Optima is gonna really maximize the value of your investment as fast as possible. Rob Steele, the Workday leader in us, that reached out to us, that was his goal earlier this year, and we've doubled down and really excited to get our first live stories.
[00:17:46] Houman Immen: The good thing is this is not new to ERPA. The institutions we've been working for the past two years have really leveraged the same methodology, and now we're going to market with it and opening it up in partnership with Workday for a broader footprint of institutions. And on the next slide, I think the foundation of Optima is really what we call it as a deployment, as a service.
[00:18:04] Houman Immen: Software as a service has been used, but we think when you start implementing deployments, have to have a roadmap as well. So it really starts with the essentials deployment, taking prepackaged offerings that are pre-configured after hundreds, as TJ alluded deployments have been done. We have access to best practices and we can go ahead and leverage that to come to the table with a prescriptive methodology that is also uniquely modified for your needs.
[00:18:28] Houman Immen: Then er P'S Bridge support. Our DNA has always been in managed services from day one before we started doing Workday deployments, and we've leveraged that DNA to perfect it in terms of what you need when you go, when the activation happens, and when you go live. So I'm gonna tell you more details around that.
[00:18:43] Houman Immen: And the concept of rolling adoption is also key. The third pillar, which is you don't have to consume all of that functionality upfront. And we build that into the roadmap for the first couple years to make sure that you can consume what's needed to go live, but also have a roadmap for what's needed after go live.
[00:19:00] Houman Immen: And we partner with you on that. And last but not least, the value added application services. Once you go live, you still need experts to help you, help you with arms transfer day-to-day needs and road mapping, and making sure the AI platform that you've purchased is maximized for any functionality that we are supposed to be experts and let you know how to best use it.
[00:19:20] Houman Immen: So those usually occur as you stabilize and you go live. And then next what I would like to highlight is the same thing I mentioned in the visual, which really helps to put everything in perspective. So I talked about a predictable but tailored offering. So the predictability comes with that initial go live, which is the activation to get you up and running with an essentials deployment.
[00:19:39] Houman Immen: And then as soon as the. Go live happens. Then the next stage is the three pillars, the ERPA great support, which is imagine handholding for payroll, for functions like financials, for functions like student registration and enrollments when you first go live. We have put kind of a program in place together with partnering with existing customers and seeing what needs they have, and we perfected it to make sure that we're there to support you for those first critical months in a new application.
[00:20:07] Houman Immen: And then the rolling adoption starts coming in as a layer to make sure we also start consuming all the software that potentially was not implemented that you purchased. And it could be the exciting items that you didn't really want to get up and running immediately, but then you want to have as you start stabilizing.
[00:20:23] Houman Immen: And the last but not least, that insurers that you have, that we are an extension of your team to be able to maximize the value of what they day to day. So now how do we differentiate in this delivery? Because a lot of the ecosystem partners are also saying the same thing, and AI has been used a lot, and we're really excited about the AI that we are leveraging for deployment and why it's different than other institutions that are using potentially different partners at ERPA.
[00:20:49] Houman Immen: Really, the marriage between AWS and Workday is unique. We're gonna spend a lot of time talking about that, and that gives us a differentiation. So the AI driven delivery for us is using the best in class platform of AWS to help with data conversion, to help with testing and things like that. So that's something I'm going to tell you more about, a little bit on the next slide.
[00:21:09] Houman Immen: But then the expertise that we have. It's really important. You still need experts. So for example, our student team, the average years of experience for Caroline and her team is 16 years plus. So we have been in higher ed, we understand your environment, we understand how to make recommendations. Some of them have been a former registrar, former financial aid director, so they understand what it takes to be in your shoes, but also.
[00:21:34] Houman Immen: Have spent number of years becoming certified in Workday and have numbers of implementations to be able to bring the Workday technology to you. And then last but not least, the value-based framework is really something that is because of our DNA and managed services that we think is differentiating us.
[00:21:50] Houman Immen: Ultimately. All that being said, you still potentially could need some staff augmentation and resources, and then that's another thing ERPA is differentiated on. We have in the past 26 years have a division within our company that does client site staffing. So we can potentially provide your project managers test leads and anything that you have gaps for that implementation as you do have a job to do day to day, and maybe it would distract you while you're implementing Workday.
[00:22:15] Houman Immen: So we wanna compliment you for that short period where any short term staff augmentation. So those four things combine really make us more valuable than I think anybody in the ecosystem when it comes to the needs of a small institution. And now more on that AI delivery that we're really excited. So at the core of it, ERPA has for a number of years, built a platform called Active Genie, which is really an orchestration tool built on AWS certified by AWS and using the best technologies AWS offers to make things simple and allows us to move faster and do things with less error and higher quality.
[00:22:50] Houman Immen: And that translates to GoLive for you that are on time and on budget on the left side core data accelerator. Integration accelerator, test accelerator. Those are things that all partners will offer. The advantage we have is we built it all on the AWS platform, so it's easy for us to maximize our investment and rapid growth in terms of how fast we go to market with it, because of the in-house knowledge that we have.
[00:23:14] Houman Immen: On the right side, Shawn is gonna spend a lot of time talking about our unique ability to. Start a Workday evaluation with a cloud foundation assessment to not only help you with the justification for a purchasing Workday, but look at all the data that resides in your campus, potentially in different servers and different areas and different partners that probably are servicing you.
[00:23:35] Houman Immen: And look at if there's a way for us to look at all your IT assets and how we can. Migrate or modernize it. That's outside of Workday and we are doing that with a, a campus that Shawn is gonna talk more about later today and the data bridge, which I'm excited for Shawn to spend more time. But the one area that we're really excited about what AWS AI and technology is helping us is in the student area and how applicable it is to moving data for years that you have been, you know, you have lots of data in curriculum programs.
[00:24:04] Houman Immen: Caroline, you wanna mention high level some of the. Ways we're helping our current institutions with our data, with their, their sure with their data.
[00:24:12] Caroline Weir: Yes, I'd love to. So there's two different elements of, uh, student data. So there's the obvious student data conversion, which of course is massively complex.
[00:24:20] Caroline Weir: It needs to be complex. We've got a lot of years of history for our students. We wanna make sure that as you move forward into Workday, their academic progress and their transcripts are accurate and exactly what they should be. So we've built a data conversion model that supports our student, um, data really by validating the data before we even attempt to load it into Workday.
[00:24:39] Caroline Weir: So we're cross-referencing all of the configuring. That are required. We're cross stressing all of those other upstream and downstream elements that need to be in place before we can join everything together to make it that final student record. So a real deep validation that actually makes functional sense a, a non-technical user can understand what that validation error.
[00:24:59] Caroline Weir: Means and, and help them resolve it. So that's our first one. Our second data element that we are kinda really proud of is the ability to go into any institution's website and really go grab your course catalog, your list of programs, your majors, your minors, whatever those happen to be, and if you've published it on your website, all of the things that go with that.
[00:25:21] Caroline Weir: So the course locations, the course types, the course delivery method. Is it a lecture, is it a lab? What are the. Co and prerequisites for that course. And on the academics programs and plans, what are those, you know, what's the academic requirements that you need to be able to enter that program study and also graduate from it?
[00:25:39] Caroline Weir: So we can go in just from your website and grab that, make it nice flat kinda grid file that we can then start to work with you to make changes, to validate it, to tweak it, to turn it into what you need to load into Workday, and then load it into Workday. And we find that to be a massive efficiency on our student.
[00:25:57] Caroline Weir: Projects going forward. I'm really super proud of that. And if you move on to the next slide, I wanna share something else, which isn't necessarily AI delivered, but something else that we offer on the student implementation side, which is really, again, a huge efficiency for student implementation projects.
[00:26:14] Caroline Weir: We have, uh, pre-built security model for student. We have done. Many, many, many student implementations, and we see some of the same roles and requirements over and over again. So to be able to start on day one on a student, as you get into the tenant with the level of security that we expect your users to need on when they go live.
[00:26:38] Caroline Weir: Rather than trying to work with you and go through thousands of users and thousands of domains and try and figure out what everybody needs access to, we've got that already built for you. It takes us not very long to get into your tenants, and then again, we just need to work with you to refine it.
[00:26:53] Caroline Weir: Obviously every institution has some differences, but these are where the commonalities come in. So some of those differences may be that we need to get into what we call in Workday, segment based security groups, which is really saying, okay, everybody in the institution on the administrative side perhaps has access to student notes, but now we want to break it down and say only financial aid.
[00:27:16] Caroline Weir: Staff can see financial aid notes. Only registrar staff can see, um, notes on a student's academic record. So those are where some of those institutional specific conversations come in, as well as those add-on security roles. So we don't know if you have a help desk or maybe you have a. Special military department or international department that maybe needs a little bit of a difference of security and we can really focus on those elements of security rather than the entire huge security model itself.
[00:27:46] Caroline Weir: We give you a lot of reports to help you manage it. They stay with you as you move through your implementation and beyond, and that's where you can really analyze who has access to the correct information to be able to. To do their job. And just, um, moving into the next slide, we'll just show you an example of some of the kinda, um, role-based security groups that we bring to the table.
[00:28:07] Caroline Weir: So just at a high level in those kind of functional areas of Workday. So we'll bring in financial aid director roles, financial aid, assistant director roles, bursar roles, associate barar roles, registrar, associate registrar. You can see for yourself what they look like. So hand you back to Houman
[00:28:27] Houman Immen: Caroline so extend if you have not heard Workday Extent is really unique in terms of being able to build secure, uh, natively integrated applications directly inside the Workday platform. And being a built on Workday partner means that you go through the rigor to become a selective. Partner that actually partners with Workday's product teams to understand their strategy and roadmap in higher education.
[00:28:50] Houman Immen: We started looking at several areas where Workday wasn't planning on building out the product or student product, and there was a, a perceived gap by some institutions because they had a need. But the benefit is it gives the same security model, the same ui, the user interface that Workday has the same data objects, and most importantly the same business process framework, and it's inside Workday.
[00:29:10] Houman Immen: So we use that and create an app that is seamlessly integrated for your unique needs. And one example of it, I think is, uh, really exciting to talk about is the attendance tracker. Caroline, you wanna share more about her please?
[00:29:22] Caroline Weir: I'd be delighted to. Thank you. So we worked with initially Tallahassee Community College to develop something to help them be able to take class attendance.
[00:29:30] Caroline Weir: So Workday does have the ability to take some level of attendance and record verified participation, but it doesn't go granular enough. And so Tallahassee Community College request aid, someone build this WeWork with them to build a an extend app. And what it does is it's. It's an attendance tracking hub built within the Workday system.
[00:29:49] Caroline Weir: You wouldn't know that you are an extend, you think that you're actually in Workday As an instructor, I can go in and say, what are my classes today and who should be attending those classes? And then I can take actual class attendance for that. Particular section on that particular day. I can also go back in time and correct attendance if I made a mistake or maybe I didn't take attendance that day and, and now I'm catching up and everything in here is auditable.
[00:30:15] Caroline Weir: So there's a fuel audit trail. There's reporting capabilities here. A lot of schools will want to use this to control financial aid disbursements, but there's also reporting capabilities that the student themselves on their self-service pages can see what attendance that they're currently tracking at.
[00:30:31] Caroline Weir: And as we developed this, we then started to work with another college, a technical college, who said, this is great. This is exactly what we need, but we need a little bit more. We actually, at this college, needed to record attendance down to the actual minute of the course, so they're not quite a clock hours school, but they did want to record that.
[00:30:49] Caroline Weir: This course should include, say, 120 hours. Of teaching. And so they wanted to be able to record whether that student did satisfy those 120 hours and so they can record if the student was late or if, if they were late, they can also record whether that student was given permission to be late or is was just being tardy in their, in their lateness.
[00:31:11] Caroline Weir: So we are implementing that right now at our technical college. So I'm really excited about that. Thank you, Houman.
[00:31:18] Houman Immen: Yep. Absolutely. Thank you, Caroline. So then a little bit more specific about Optima and our pricing and packages in high level timelines. Next. So the Optima core package is really designed for under 500.
[00:31:31] Houman Immen: What Workday refers to is for full subscription equivalent, but pretend that it's a combination of your full-time, part-time employees and adds up to 500 and below. And usually there's a model for that. So. Don't worry about the size as much that we present here. Doesn't mean a 600 doesn't qualify, doesn't mean a 400 would be not in a package.
[00:31:48] Houman Immen: So these are really general guidelines and 2000 full-time equivalent students. So full-time enrollment. So for that package, I think what we wanna share you on the next slide is some high level pricing. So on the platform side, we have the SKUs that Workday and us have partnered with, which is the core foundation for financial payroll, HCM.
[00:32:07] Houman Immen: But it's also got areas like absence, time tracking as, as well as recruiting things that we see very commonly needed. Upfront for an institution. And then you see Asterisk is below, which is around Prism Extend. We just talked about it. Grants functionality, which you can have some of the light functionality available to go forward with it, but then it becomes more complex and there's some unique use cases that we can help you on.
[00:32:30] Houman Immen: The rolling adoption and once past go live, you have a need for that. Now on the platform and student side. It's a longer timeline. So on the left side, it's really the platform and it's a 26 to 30 week implementation. On the right side, we added student to it. So everything in platform plus all the students SKUs with, uh, and then that's a different timeline.
[00:32:48] Houman Immen: It's 26 to 30 weeks to get the platform up and running. And it really depends how long it takes for a student. It could be faster, depending on when we start. It could be longer. Generally it's. Two years, but we've seen some faster timelines with some of the smaller institutions, but we won't give an answer because it's really about you, your enrollments, registrations, and calendars, and what's it fit for you in terms of when we start the project and how we think it's the best time for you to go live?
[00:33:12] Houman Immen: On the pricing side, we have some general, we said it's a predictable. Cost model. So on the platform is 4 75 to 5 25. And on the platform to student, the general is 2.5 to 3 million. That doesn't include some of the ongoing value added services. We layer that on top of it and we have specific numbers for you in the future slides.
[00:33:31] Houman Immen: So we'll see that later on this morning. So now, because we know there are institutions that potentially are gonna say, Hey, listen, I, I like everything but. Six month is too fast for me. I want to a little bit more, I want some features added. We've created a second package. We call it Optima Flex, and that's really for a thousand.
[00:33:51] Houman Immen: And also, if they have more complex needs and higher volume of students, which brings more data conversion and more parameters into the equation, then this is Optima Flex. The pricing is a little different, the same manner I just shared. I'm gonna go ahead and show you. What the pricing is on the next slide, which is the platform is usually the same SKUs here, but it's a longer timeline, 40 to 44 weeks.
[00:34:12] Houman Immen: Seven 50 to 950 is the estimate average, and the platform plus student, again, all the same SKUs as the last model of Optima. But it's a little longer timeline, again, for platform and student. Again, to be determined. It doesn't have to be longer. It could be still two years, but it's really just based on unique needs.
[00:34:31] Houman Immen: That's 3.5 to three 9 million, 3.9 million. That's a one-time implementation award, the range that we give you. And then we layer a small amount of our value added services, enrolling adoption deployment as a service to really help that. Once you go live, you're successful. And I'm gonna share more on the next slide.
[00:34:49] Houman Immen: So these are the value services. So the deployment was in the previous slide, and if you looked at it, there were two packages of presented Optima and Optima Flex. And if some schools go with students, some don't. We see student being adopted with majority of the implementations we're seeing in the past couple years because the value of having one system for student HCM payroll finance is really unique in the ecosystem of higher education.
[00:35:13] Houman Immen: When you look at all providers. Workday and others, that's the maximum value you get. So we encourage everybody to look at student and have a broad roadmap for that. And that's the Optima enterprise and that's the Optima flex enterprise when you include student. And if you don't, then it's just Optima platform and Optima flex platform.
[00:35:30] Houman Immen: So those year one, two, and three. Prices are written there. So what happens after go live, we layer those costs for you post go live. Only the first couple years are recommended and the third year is optional. So we know that you're gonna need support. And some of the bridge offerings we have, I mentioned to you, are included in that.
[00:35:47] Houman Immen: The value added services included in that, the implementation of feature functionality. For a couple items. It's probably included in that for most universities. So we really custom tailor it to your unique needs to make sure that this is about you and not just the package. So this is the flexibility that we have added to our implementation to make sure once you go live, you have the ability to extend the functionality needed and get it implemented as fast as possible and maximum adoption across the campus.
[00:36:15] Houman Immen: So. Some assumptions. High level. I'm sure everybody's curious if there are any gotchas here, but you know when, when it comes to Optima packages, it is a prescriptive and iterative approach. That's why it's taking six months. And you know, we use ERPA, the predefined higher education tenant, which is we've created the best practices for security reports, dashboards, and we come to the table with ideas for you, leveraging best practices and modifying it for your unique needs.
[00:36:40] Houman Immen: If we take a higher business process or if we take anything else, we'll still. Customize it, as we said in previous roles, but in the Workday world, we say configure it to your needs so it's not completely boxed, but you have the flexibility. But we try to recommend things to you so you are able to really focus on testing and go live and not sit there on a design session for months.
[00:37:00] Houman Immen: If you are looking for design and long, big gap analysis, that's not a fit. We're taking this. Package from us is really something that hundreds of institutions have already used. So why not take that best practice is create this tenant we have and come to the table and offer what other institutions are using and accelerate our value in terms of moving faster to design and being able to focus on testing knowledge transfer prior to at.
[00:37:24] Houman Immen: That's really the core philosophy and we ultimately need some resources that we mentioned. Uh, you should have some project coordination and staff log to be able to keep up with the timelines and we're there to help in case you look for options around that. And then what's out scope in these packages is really a.
[00:37:39] Houman Immen: If it's grant management and endowments that are really complex, we have ability for some of our existing universities that we deployed, that they have grant functionality. And Workday is very flexible. It allows you to enable tracking them easily. So for Go live, it's not jeopardizing you, but there are some unique ones that require heavy grant deployments.
[00:37:57] Houman Immen: And then there's multiple accounting standards and very large historical data that are really the two other items that make it complex. And I say two other items. There are five things here because. Complex unions, multiple jobs are not that prevalent in some of the institutions we have. We have institutions that have unions.
[00:38:13] Houman Immen: That's perfectly fine. And we don't see the complexity typically that we see potentially in government or other industries exist in higher ed for unions. So that's okay, but it's just an FYI in case you, you do have that. And then last but not least, advanced security, Caroline mentioned we've already looked at security and we try to come outta the box to eliminate that need.
[00:38:32] Houman Immen: So taking the best practice security that's available. Then on the student side, I think it's important to talk a little bit more about the unique aspects of how we, uh, partner with Workday to lower the cost and bring the value to you faster. So Caroline, Libby, you wanna mention a little bit more about these packages and how they're different between Optima?
[00:38:50] Houman Immen: Got
[00:38:51] Caroline Weir: it. Sure. And, and so the size of students is, is written here, obviously. Um, Houman said we can be flexible on that of course, but some of the things that are different is particularly that first line that moves to production. So in a normal, if I could say that student implementation, we might have two moves to production.
[00:39:09] Caroline Weir: One to support your admission cycle, your financial aid for applicant cycle, your, your new student packaging, and then a second one really to support everything else from registration onwards. And with Optima Flex, we're proposing still to have those two moves to production. Optima itself might only have one move to production.
[00:39:28] Caroline Weir: One move to production really will suit those smaller institutions that maybe they have rolling admissions, where as soon as the student reaches that admit stage, you want to matriculate them and become a student. So you don't want that delay to work on anything with that student as an applicant. So one move to production.
[00:39:46] Caroline Weir: Won't work for everybody, won't suit every institution, but if it does, it just means that we have a little bit less time on those types of implementations. There's less test cycles, there's less what we call tenant bills. There's a little bit more efficiency with just having one move to production. The number of students, the number of courses that are kinda indicative numbers there.
[00:40:06] Caroline Weir: We will, um, want our institutions to be single institutions. Multi-institution is very complex. So single institution is a given and then some other exclusions. So institutional methodology really isn't something that we would want to do within Workday, but we can support third party integrations if you're using a third party system for that.
[00:40:26] Caroline Weir: And then complex processing around medical schools, nursing schools, law schools, and not all law schools have. Complexities and not all nursing schools have the complexities. So we really would want to work with each individual school just to understand, is this an exclusion or can we flex with this? Can we accommodate that?
[00:40:44] Caroline Weir: And then, you know, continuing education again is something that we would want you to be using a third party for. And we could talk about whether we integrated that within Workday or if it was just a standalone system. So these exclusions, I guess, are, are, are indicative. We can flex, we can adjust based on the institution's specific needs.
[00:41:03] Houman Immen: Hey, I think next we're gonna move on to Workday Plus what I was really excited to tell you more, and Shawn is gonna take it from here. All right, thank you,
[00:41:10] Shawn Fournier: Houman. Thank you, Caroline. Yes. Let's, let's talk a little bit about Workday Plus. So. I think you can see ERPs and Workday's commitment to making Workday more accessible, right?
[00:41:23] Shawn Fournier: We have fixed price packages, we have deployment as a service, but we can also go a little bit further than that because one of the challenges that we see is that organizations are looking at, yes, Workday makes sense? Yes, we want Workday. Cost is a challenge and it just, the whole thing just seems like a bit much.
[00:41:37] Shawn Fournier: So what we're able to do is literally. Help build a stronger business case for Workday adoption with Workday Plus. And what that looks like is essentially we're saying, look, we get where you're at, but we have a unique view on things. ERPA is an AWS customer, an AWS partner, a Workday customer, a Workday partner.
[00:41:54] Shawn Fournier: So we can bring that together and. All of us understand the value that Workday brings to the table in terms of modernization. ERPA is able to extrapolate or extend that value to adjacent work systems, and that's really what we're identifying as Workday. Plus the motion is really just about when it makes sense.
[00:42:11] Shawn Fournier: It's about expanding the scope beyond Workday to help reduce your TCO, improve your ROI. Build a a stronger business case internally for Workday adoption and for institution-wide modernization. So Workday is a strategic deployment. No doubt. If you're hyper-focused on Workday, this is not meant to be a distraction.
[00:42:31] Shawn Fournier: Set it aside. But if you're looking for potentially opportunities to create a stronger business case for Workday adoption, then you need to look at the bigger picture. And that's exactly what we can help you with in the Workday Plus motion. So we understand the value of Workday on AWS or in the public cloud.
[00:42:48] Shawn Fournier: What's the value of modernizing adjacent workflows? I, I've just pulled a couple out of recent reports from Gartner, IDC and Forrester If we're looking at enterprise applications sitting in the data center and we move those applications to the cloud, the infrastructure cost reduction on average is 30 to 45%.
[00:43:06] Shawn Fournier: That number can be used to offset the cost of a Workday deployment if done in conjunction the ROI three year return on infrastructure modernization, 200% and on down the line. So all we're saying is that there is intrinsic value in adjacent applications, and in some cases it may make sense to incorporate that into building a stronger business case that helps build up a more compelling motion for Workday adoption.
[00:43:35] Shawn Fournier: We'll just leave it at that really. What happens with ERPA is, as I mentioned, as a Workday customer and partner, and as an AWS customer and partner, we really do bring them together the best of both worlds as far as Workday stuff. Yeah. You guys know, you've seen already a glimpse into our Workday expertise, right?
[00:43:55] Shawn Fournier: When Workday announced it, folks need to move from private to public. They trusted ERPA enough to be one of the six companies recommended to help their existing customers. As you know, we're an implementation partner, an A MS partner extend, and on down the line, what you may not know is that we're also a very highly credentialed AWS partner, so we're an advanced tier consulting partner, AWS.
[00:44:17] Shawn Fournier: Authenticates subject matter experts via a rigorous third party audit. For example, out of 190,000 partners, AWS has less than 100 partners that are Education Competency certified. ERPA is one of those 100 companies. We're a migration and modernization competency partner and Oracle workload partner and on down the line.
[00:44:38] Shawn Fournier: So the unique position that we have because of our experience, is that we're able to bring the value forward of both Workday. And AWS and the best of both worlds. So our Workday plus motion is truly a three step approach. It's really simple, right outta the box. The first thing that we do is we offer a Cloud Foundation assessment.
[00:44:58] Shawn Fournier: The Cloud foundation assessment is an AI discovery methodology that we deploy that really evaluates everything beyond Workday in the data center, and it produces a very deep executive summary that says, this is the IT landscape. This is what it would look like modernized in the cloud. This would be the recommended wave approach to that over the course of the next three to five years, and this would be the TCL improvement and the ROI realization over that period of time.
[00:45:28] Shawn Fournier: Some of those things coming obviously right out of the gate in year one. That is what it is. It's a. An offering that we deliver to our clients free of charge. It's an offering that once you receive the executive summary, you can utilize, you can leverage to help build a stronger business case for Workday adoption.
[00:45:45] Shawn Fournier: You can execute against that three to five year strategy on your own. Obviously, we'd be thrilled if you wanted us to help you with that, or you can throw it away, but at least you have some business intelligence. Institution wide to understand what the Workday adoption looks like and what the implications of Workday adoption are to the rest of your institution.
[00:46:05] Shawn Fournier: Once we've done the cloud foundation assessment, what are the next steps that we help with is what we call a data bridge, and it's really about helping you organize your data, again, institution wide, in a way that enables a more efficient Workday deployment, as well as more efficient modernization of adjacent workloads.
[00:46:24] Shawn Fournier: Ideally, once we get there with a common platform beneath Workday and the rest of your applications, we're able to layer in things like business intelligence and things like AI and agent ai. So organizing your data typically becomes the next step, and then it's all about realizing the vision. It's about executing against that targeted roadmap and ensuring that you're not only maximizing the value of Workday adoption, but you're also pulling through that value or extrapolating that value across your IT landscape to the rest of the organization.
[00:46:55] Shawn Fournier: The outcome is exactly what I think we're all after, right? How do we create a modern data-driven institution that's more efficient, secure, and responsive in a way that is really. Digestible for the institution, and that's really the goal here, right? Is to create an offer with Optima that is at a price point that can be justified, that is at a deployment scale that can be managed, and by the way, also creates an opportunity for additional modernization beyond ERP.
[00:47:22] Shawn Fournier: That's really what it's all about. Here's what good looks like. A couple of very quick examples. We see Workday plus show up in a couple of ways. One way is at a project level, so we're working with the technical college right now in the Midwest net new Workday deployment. They came to us and said, this looks great.
[00:47:37] Shawn Fournier: We love it, but we need help building a stronger business case for the board to approve this. The question was simple, right? Are there other things that you're doing in your IT estate that maybe you could do in a better way, maybe that we could do more efficiently? So that if we could reduce the cost there, we could apply those savings to the Workday deployment costs.
[00:47:55] Shawn Fournier: And the CTO was very transparent with us and said, absolutely. Here are five projects that we have upcoming next year. Any one of these would help probably offset the cost of deployments. We began working through those projects, identified a virtual applications project that actually is gonna go into POC this month.
[00:48:12] Shawn Fournier: For them. It's a million dollar a year project for this institution. The savings there gave him the confidence to build a business case for Workday deployment. As a result, they're deploying Workday today, uh, HCM, payroll and Finance. They're gonna deploy student next year. They've obviously, uh, employed ERPA as their deployment partner.
[00:48:30] Shawn Fournier: And, uh, additionally we're able to extrapolate and extend value beyond Workday into, uh, adjacent workloads, right? The end user compute environment. We're also putting together a labs environment on down the line, so. Workday plus shows up sometimes in a project level where like, yeah, we wanna adopt Workday.
[00:48:48] Shawn Fournier: And by the way, here's one other big thing that we could maybe do better that would help justify the cost and build a stronger business case. The other way that it shows up is in an entire data center evacuation. And the reality is, a lot of times when institutions are adopting Workday or modernizing their ERP, they're evacuating 30 to 40% of their data center footprint.
[00:49:08] Shawn Fournier: At that point, it does make sense to at least evaluate whether it would be worthwhile to evacuate the rest of the data center, and we will. Our offering is with a cloud foundation assessment is simply. If we're gonna go Workday, which we think is the right choice, we're Workday clients ourselves. We've evacuated 30% of the data center.
[00:49:26] Shawn Fournier: How about if we model for you what the rest of that would look like in the cloud? That's the Cloud Foundation assessment. With that, you can then determine if you want to progress down that path over time as it comes. So those are the two ways that Workday Plus really shows up adjacent to Workday deployments.
[00:49:44] Shawn Fournier: With that, we'll turn things back over to Jeff and uh, thank you. Thank you very much for your time.
[00:49:49] Jeff Miller: Awesome man.
[00:49:50] Jeff Miller: Great job team. Lemme start with this one. You may have answered this already. Houman, I think I'm gonna ask you for this one. So can we choose whether to implement Workday student now or postpone it to later with a phased approach?
[00:50:04] Houman Immen: Yes. I think as I was saying, it's great to look at student and platform combined for the overall total cost of ownership and the benefits that you get with adoption institution wide, but it's absolutely possible to stage it. We can sit there and put a plan together based on enrollment, registration, dates, and your existing systems that potentially could be decommissioned or going out of.
[00:50:24] Houman Immen: Kind of, um, you've invested in them, but they're maybe older. So we can work with you hand in hand, put a timeline together that's either concurrent or phased out. So, yes. Cool.
[00:50:36] Shawn Fournier: And then Houman, what if our institution falls outside of the employee or student maximum to qualify for Optima? Is there any wiggle room or is this a hard ceiling?
[00:50:46] Shawn Fournier: The
[00:50:46] Houman Immen: answer is, yeah, there's wiggle room. Those are general guidelines. When we put packages, we try to put some parameters to make sure we communicate and make it simple to consume for anybody. On a call like this, but ultimately, no, we can't say everybody's the same. So you may have a small school for some unique aspects of their business that it's not a fit, or you have a larger school that actually is a fit that is outside of those parameters.
[00:51:09] Houman Immen: So the answer is yes, we're open to talking about it and recommending a path and a re journey that works for you.
[00:51:14] Jeff Miller: On our last slide, everybody, you'll see several ways to get in touch with ERPA or to follow us. Uh, thank you team for your work you put into this material. Hopefully you found this, uh, Workday deployment discussion helpful, but yeah, get in touch with us.
[00:51:27] Jeff Miller: You can contact us at this email address. info@erpa.com. Get in touch with us. We'll put you in touch with exactly the right expert to answer your questions. Or if you want to pursue any sort of a deeper dive conversation that leads to a relationship, we would love and welcome that conversation. You can also visit us online.
[00:51:45] Jeff Miller: You'll find multiple ways. Get in touch with us there and of course, follow us on LinkedIn. That's it for now. We hope that you have a great rest of your day. 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.