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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.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:00:00]:
I've worked with application-managed services providers for 20 plus years in my tenure and my, you know, my career starting in it and I really truly think that ERPA is a cut above the rest in having that kind of truly embedded in our team. You know, if I have a question about benefits that I just need to answer right now, I don't have to log a ticket, right? I mean I will ultimately if there's work to be done, but I can just email or team someone or even pick up the phone and call them, which I know is a crazy concept here in 2024 that we don't use our phones as phones, but hello friends.
Jeff Miller [00:00:35]:
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. Navigating the challenges of mergers and acquisitions doesn't have to feel like an uphill battle. It can actually open doors to growth and opportunity. Today we're uncovering how Flexera Software is making that journey smoother and more efficient. Joining us is Jennifer Matsuoka, Senior Director of People, Strategy and Analytics at Flexera Software. With over 20 years of experience in the industry, Jennifer will share insights into her partnership with ERPA, including their most recent acquisition experiences. Jennifer will walk us through real-life scenarios such as addressing staffing challenges during critical periods and working through differing communication styles with efficiency and ease. You'll hear about her steps to directly tackle issues and how a quick response from ERPA ensured continuity without disruption.
Jeff Miller [00:01:40]:
Here are some actionable takeaways to look forward to from this episode. Number one, strategies for successfully integrating new teams during acquisitions. Number two, the value of having consistent named team members from your AMS partner and number three, how agility and a relational approach can turn a challenge into an opportunity for growth. Let's dive in. So Jennifer, tell us about yourself and then if you wouldn't mind, tell us a little bit about the company that you work for, including your employee count.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:02:13]:
My name is Jennifer Matsuoka. I am the Senior Director of People Strategy and Analytics at Flexera Software. Flexera is a technology company based and headquartered in Itasca, Illinois which is a Chicago suburb and we are passionate about reimagining the way software is bought, sold, managed and secured. We develop industry-leading AI-enabled solutions for technology value optimization, enabling it, finance and procurement as well as cloud teams to gain deep insights into their cost optimization, compliance and risks. Our most recognized flagship product is for anyone who has ever installed software in your computer and you have the little wizard and you say next, next, next. Done. That's our install shield and so it is on nearly every home computer. So that is our company.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:03:03]:
I've worked there for 14 and a half years so clearly it's a company that I'm passionate about. But we have great people, we have great assets. I started on the IT side managing our business applications. So at the time we had things like Oracle and Essbase and Hyperion. We had a number of HR-related apps. And then throughout the years I've sort of moved over and up and now I am on the HR side.
Jeff Miller [00:03:29]:
It's a great company with great people and you do wonderful work. I'm familiar with your work and I love it. So thank you for that introduction. Now let's talk about Workday. Describe your workday journey. When did you go live on Workday? And what do you like about being a workday customer?
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:03:45]:
So we just hit our eight year anniversary on Workday. We went live in November of 2016 and our company has grown exponentially since that time. I started back in 2010 and we had just about 400 employees and we were global. In fact, the day that I started was the day that we announced an acquisition of a major company in Australia. So this concept of acquisitions is in my core at Flexera. So we had about 400 people at the time. We had a hodgepodge of systems. We had ADP and three different platforms of ADP not just for payroll but also for HRIs.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:04:23]:
We had Visier for reporting. We had Cornerstone on demand. Actually, I think before that we had success factors. So you know, we've, we've used all the smaller systems, right. And we had this hodgepodge and we knew on both this acquisition actually really triggered our leadership to say, you know what, we are growing, we're entering more markets and we spend a lot of time focusing on the commercial aspects and how do we get our products right and how do we challenge our go to market strategies. But we also need to pay attention to the back office things. We need to shore up our financial systems, our HR systems, any of our internal systems. And so we embarked on a journey to see what were the right systems for us both on Fins and HCM.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:05:11]:
Obviously with looking at both of those, Workday was the first place we looked, right? Market leader Gartner, Magic Quadrant, that top right corner. And I'll be honest, we thought we're not going to get Workday. We're not big enough, right? They're going to be too Much too over the top, too heavy. We're not going to be able to do it, we're not going to be able to afford it, we're not going to be able to make the business case. And we were pleased to find that that wasn't the case. Right. Workday, despite its industry-leading status, was perfectly sized for mid-size. Right.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:05:46]:
I mean they have a whole component around that. We ultimately didn't choose Workday for financials, but I'm confident it's just a matter of time until we, till we, till we make that transition and we move over to Workday for fins and payroll. So we embarked on this project and we were doing two projects at the same time. We were migrating our financials from all things Oracle, Essbase, Hyperion over to NetSuite and at the time what was called Adaptive Planning. And then we were also migrating everything and converting on the HSM side from all of those legacy products and one-offs to Workday. And so, you know, we don't do anything small at Flexera. So we did an acquisition and we did these two transitions or conversions and migration projects and we did all of these in a span of about five months. And it was also, you know, we went live with Workday in November of 2016.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:06:39]:
So there was a lot going on in the world with a very big election and my beloved Cubbies finally broke their 108-year drought. And so between projects and you know, life, there was no sleeping, but everyone was way too excited about everything that was going on to be, to be mad about it.
Jeff Miller [00:06:58]:
I love it. I love how you're connecting all of these life events together in a, in a period of time. And I also love that the acquisition story played into your workday journey because it's a later acquisition, a much more recent acquisition that's going to form part of our conversation in a little bit. So thank you for that and sharing your workday journey with me. So let's talk about now ERPA and a workday support partner. What led you to realize that you needed a workday support partner? And then of course, why did you choose ERPA?
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:07:29]:
ERPA is not our first or even our second workday partner. When we did that implementation we worked with a different partner and I think I've met many workday customers over the last eight-plus years who didn't even really know about the partner ecosystem and that was always surprising to me. But then I also think I've spent my career either first in IT and now in hr, supporting business applications. And so Working with a managed services vendor is second nature to me. It never even occurred to me that we would implement Workday, relying only on Workday, which is nothing bad about Workday, right? But it is just I always knew that we would have a partner. So we picked a partner and we worked with them during the implementation and everything was great. I mean, obviously we had, you know, hiccups because every implementation does, but we had great success with that partner. And then as things changed, we decided that partner was no longer the best one for us and we moved to a second partner.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:08:26]:
You know, we've had great success with both of these partners. We have, you know, gone live, we've added additional functionality. We have ingested other smaller acquisitions. But then again, when we were, you know, coming toward the end of last year, and we kind of knew that this acquisition was a decent possibility, right? It was, it was behind the scenes, but we knew that it would happen and we knew that this, again, would be an inflection point for us. You know, we went. We acquired about 450 employees as a result of this acquisition, many more regions. And so we're now at about 2. A little over 2000 employees worldwide and about 2400 if you factor in our contingent workforce.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:09:06]:
So we knew we needed to shore up and get ready. Right. And so I, in my project manager mode, put together a very detailed scorecard, a rating of how we would kind of attack this problem of finding the right partner for us, the partner that really could carry us through. I am very candid. I'm very transparent, and I say this is, this is what is happening. Right. And I, of course, couldn't say for sure we're having an acquisition because we're NDA. But to say we grow both organically and by acquisition, and each acquisition gets bigger, both in scope and complexity.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:09:45]:
We know that this will happen. You know, the corporate world sort of took a little bit of a backseat on M and A for the last, you know, two or three years between Covid and kind of coming out of that and recession. But companies are getting back in, and we're. We're doing that as well. And we're very actively pursuing, you know, several opportunities. So I had the scorecard. We had, I think, seven major contenders in play, including workday, So a combination of their office hours and a couple of their other offerings. Right.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:10:16]:
And how could we package those together? And so we essentially went on an interviewing process, right. And we met with each one of these vendors sometimes more than once, right. To kind of dig down and get under the covers on questions and things. And one of the key like non-negotiable requirements for me was that we needed a partner who would give us named resources. And I don't mean just named resources, like, hey, heads up tomorrow, you know, Bob is on your project, please get him an account. I meant Bob is your guy, right? You're going to go to Bob. And while others there were several partners who said, sure, we can do that. And then we need to really poke and prod.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:10:55]:
It was, you'll have a team, you'll have a squad, but the squad could change. And I get it. I understand that that's a pretty typical model, but that wasn't the model that was going to work for us. We desperately needed folks who could really just be embedded and become part of our team. And so we did this scorecard. ERPA was the only one that checked every single box. We had a couple other unique requirements as well. I had the benefit of knowing that someone was going to go out on maternity leave.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:11:24]:
So I also needed a model where I could look at staff augmentation. And ERP was the only one that could check every single box. And so we, we jumped in and we've not looked back. So we're working on a renewal right now and we are thrilled that we're going to continue to partner together.
Jeff Miller [00:11:40]:
So good and so refreshing to hear. By the way, anytime I hear Scorecard, I smile because I love the concept and I love the process and it usually yields good results for those who, who approach it with a scorecard mentality. I also love, I hear it all the time, this whole named resource thing, that, that's a genuine differentiator for ERPA and it, and it really is true, as opposed to perhaps a more traditional ticketing system where your ticket goes to the next available stranger who has no background of your tenant configuration or no past conversations rolling around in their head. We pride ourselves at ERPA because we have those named resources who know your tenant configuration, have all those past conversations in their head and they get a running start anytime there's a request for support. So thank you for pointing that out. I appreciate that. I'm going to combine a couple of these questions here. So when it comes to ERPA, if you wouldn't mind, what words come to mind when you think about your ERPA team and the workday support you receive? And then you also mentioned you've had support partners prior to ERPA.
Jeff Miller [00:12:47]:
So how do you engage with ERPA differently, perhaps than you interacted in the past? With other workday partners.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:12:56]:
Yeah. So words that come to mind, collaborative, consultative, energetic, expertise, facilitators, flexible, responsive, partner and fun. That's one of the things that we love about our named resources. We, we know them, right? They are part of our team. I should say that when we were going through our interviewing process and doing our scorecard, the one additional thing that ERPA offered and brought to the table during that, you know, kind of courting phase, if you will, was, you know what, how about we put together some of the folks that we are proposing to be part of your team and you can meet them. So we did and you know, my team and I had had a Zoom call and we met folks and you know, it was all very nice and it was really meant to be, you know, here's the fit and here's the, you know, ways of working and what do you like? And it was lovely to meet everyone. And I was coming from a place where I was extremely frustrated. A challenge that we are currently experiencing with our UK benefits rollout project that we were doing to bring, you know, benefits for our UK population into Workday the same most do with us.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:14:05]:
And I was really struggling with a problem that we were facing that we were working through with our existing partner. But it just, it was, it was a little painful and part of it was because of what you just said. It wasn't necessarily a random stranger, but it was, one day one person would be answering, the next day someone else would come in and pinch hit. And so there was a lot of stuff that would get lost in translation. My team is small but mighty, which I think is what every HR team in corporate America says. But we really are, we only have one person out of our entire HR team, which by the way is 27 people to support 2,600 workers or so. So it's a lot. And we only have one person who is 100% dedicated to Workday.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:14:48]:
So we have a very small, mighty team. And so that was another challenge with this partner and with other partners and just a general AMS model. Right. It's not specific, is that you don't have that time to go back and forth and re-explain and you don't have time. You know, we worked with offshoring teams and you know, I get it, Flexera is a software company. We also have offshore teams and that model can be fantastic. And I have worked with many excellent offshore teams. The challenge for us, working with folks who are offshore or near shore, but eight hour, eight time zones away in Eastern Europe, right is that there's a very small window of the day where you really can engage with them.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:15:32]:
And so when we would have a critical break fix thing that happened after 10am in the morning, we knew we were unlikely to get a resolution the same day, which really was a challenge. So one of the things that I said to each vendor we talked to is we have to have US-based resources, right? And so ERPA pulled this team together, said, hey, let you meet some of the team. I was struggling with this UK benefits challenge and I essentially put the consultant on Spot and did almost like a pop quiz and said, here's what we're struggling with. She jumped in, she identified the problems right away. She said, have you looked at this? Have you done this? This is what I would look at. She immediately gave an answer. We took it back to the other partner and they're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. And I thought, boom, sold.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:16:21]:
Right? So she is part of our team today. She is absolutely, you know, core. She is both on our AMS side. She is on projects where we have, you know, an SOW. We're doing SOW work for acquisition work. You know, that is really key. And so that is, you know, again, that those keywords we talked about in the beginning, right, that expertise is absolutely there, but also so is the fun, right? So we have lots of fun with our team. And I think, you know, I've worked with application managed services providers for 20 plus years in my tenure and my, you know, my career starting in it.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:16:57]:
And I really truly think that ERPA is a cut above the rest in having that kind of truly embedded in our team. You know, if I have a question about benefits that I just need the answer right now. I don't have to like a ticket, right? I mean, I will ultimately if there's work to be done, but I can just email or team someone or even pick up the phone and call them, which I know is a crazy concept here in 2024 that we don't to use our phones as phones, but you know, we can actually do that and, and get a response or at least get, I don't know, but here's what I'm going to look at and they actually get back to me right away not please log a ticket. So I think you'd also ask how do we partner with them differently? It really is more of a partnership and I don't mean this in any disrespect to any other partnerships we've had in the past, but this really is ERPA and Flexera working together, ERPA both meets us where we're at and helps prepare us for where we want to be, which I just think is it's transformational for us, right. And we really have some great, we have some great projects that we've worked on together. But again, they're really embedded in our team and we know who they're going to be. I love that when I do log a ticket for a break-fix or even just a small enhancement, I have a pretty good idea of who's going to pick it up. Right.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:18:14]:
We have, we have a couple named Resources for Integrations, but I'm pretty sure that it's going to be, you know, this person versus the other. And I don't have to restart with the six-paragraph intro of here's what the integration is, here's what it does, here's what the problem is, right. You know, I can literally, you know, in some cases just log a ticket and say, hey, remember the thing that we did last week? Now we have a problem and we have to do this thing this week and they just pick it up and run with it. And they know our tenant, they know our, they know our environment. And by environment, I mean more of like our culture and our corporate environment. They know that we have, you know, different business units and how this business unit needs, you know, what do we need to think about for Flexera versus Revener, which is our supplier side of the business? You know, I can mention an exec's name as an example of this is what it's, what it's looking like for so and so and they know that means oh, it's because this is the exec of, you know, the revenue side and has these different requirements and it's just so refreshing. I can talk to them the way that I talk to my own team members.
Jeff Miller [00:19:16]:
It's that running start, right. Because of the shared recent past experience. And I love all the words you've used. I'm going to combine them into a phrase. So it's a, it's a transformational partnership that knows how to have fun at the same time. So I love that often, you know, you hear this word partnership, the concept is thrown around a lot. Until you're engaged in a genuine partnership, it really is just a word. And once you get engaged in that genuine partnership, you really begin to appreciate the full depths of meaning of that expression.
Jeff Miller [00:19:53]:
So thank you for that. We love our partnership with you and I know it is transformational both ways and we do have a lot of fun together. So I love that. Now, this year, let's talk about. I'm going to get back to this topic of acquisitions. This year has been a big one for Flexera with a pretty sizable acquisition. So my question is, what role is ERPA taking to help with this acquisition? And then can you tell us about your phased approach, including that first tight April 1 deadline, along with subsequent phases?
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:20:27]:
Absolutely. So Flexera, as I mentioned earlier, has always been acquisitive by nature. I think we counted and this is the 14th acquisition in my 14 years here. And knowing that we had, you know, probably a three or four-year drought period during, you know, pandemic and beyond. So it's always been acquisitive by nature. And no two acquisitions are ever the same, which keeps things exciting and challenging. Right. We never treat them the same way.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:20:56]:
This one because of both the size and scope. But also we were acquiring a competitor, which meant that we had to comply with very, very specific regulatory components in each of the regions where we were acquiring staff and, you know, technology. So that tight timeline you referenced, we started this project the second week of March. We went live with our UK population, which is one of the bigger populations, on April 1st. And we had to do that to meet a regulatory process called TUPE. And it's the transferring of the UK folks. And it involved things that really had nothing to do with systems. Right.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:21:40]:
It was going through a redundancy process and a consultation process, but it was mandatory that we have everyone in Workday, have those records in Workday and not the thing that you can do sometimes and get away with short term, which is slam in a shell record and say you're good. We had to be able to pay them out of Workday. We had to be able to administer benefits out of Workday on day one, which again was three weeks after we got the green light and started the project. So we scrambled and, you know, ERP really helped us. They did a lot of the heavy lifting on the configurations and things like that. And those are some things that, that my team could do. But they did a lot of the heavy lifting there. And then they also helped us stage and break down the project into, okay, how do we get into this? And, you know, my project manager brain has a Gantt chart and a plan for everything.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:22:34]:
We recently did a home run, a first-floor home renovation, and I had a project plan. And our construction company project manager said, hey, if you ever get sick of technology and you want to come work here, let me know. But we backed into that, right? And we said, okay, here's what we need to do in April 1st. And I know this probably doesn't sound transformational, but the fact that we have someone who works that way was, was important, right? Versus someone who says, here's our state of deployment plan, right? This is what we do. We do this and then this and then this, and we'll have you going live on, you know, June 1st. Like that was not going to work for us. Right? And so our engagement manager, you know, our executive director understood that and jumped in right away and said, yep, let's go backwards, right? Which is, you know, again, to that, you know, one of the keywords, flexibility, right. They're not shoehorning in a process that isn't going to work for us.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:23:25]:
So we worked through that. We got everybody in. They helped us think through some of the use cases of where, you know, we needed these folks in Workday as of April 1st. And we needed to be able to treat them as Flexera employees for payroll and for benefits. But for other things, we couldn't yet have them appear as Flexer employees, if that makes sense. Like we, we didn't want to include them in integrations to some other systems like concur, right? Because these employees still were working through their time and expense on their legacy systems. And so there was a lot of, okay, we keep them in, you know, include them here, don't include them here. How do we think through that? How as we're creating these worker records, do we identify whether it's a custom ID or we do it by pay group, or we have a special organization, you know, custom Org.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:24:18]:
How can we do this so that we kind of have one or two things that we look at to know. Look at these two things on their record and then you'll know in or out, right? And we had another final unique requirement where we couldn't put them into true org structure because of the consultation process. And so we needed everyone flat. But, you know, you can't create a worker in Workday without having a supervisor and having to supervise your org. So that created a whole other set of challenges. And ERP really helped us work through that. And again, these are things that I know we're not done acquiring. Right? So at some point we're going to go through this again and it probably will not be the same thing and it won't be the same locations and it won't be the same employee base, but the concepts will help us, right? We will take those lessons and learn forward.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:25:08]:
And ERP is with us on us. Right. ERPA helped us build those concepts. And so, you know, now we kind of have this shared lingo where we can say, remember what we did last year? Let's do that again, but with X.
Jeff Miller [00:25:22]:
Well, thank you for sharing some of that detail. When it comes to the challenges of an acquisition, you've obviously navigated a number of them, but that level of detail that you just shared gives some very specific, concrete examples of where some of the challenges rest. And that's really insightful information for our listeners. So thank you for that. You also had a unique need this year related to getting your newly acquired HR team up to speed on Workday. In particular, what was your solution there and how was ERPA involved?
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:25:56]:
We did have a very unique need there and we were in this fortunate position where we had both this SOW work for the acquisition and we had our standard AMS. And so we were in this nice place where we had more hours than we typically would have. Right? We had more ways to use that. And so as a result of that, we actually. And because we have these same named resources across both sides of the house, we weren't using all of our AMS hours and they were rolling over, which was nice. But I also thought, there's a better way we can do this, right? And so we love workday education. It's great. You know, in a perfect world we would all be certified on all the things, but.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:26:37]:
But we don't have that right. We didn't have money to spend on dedicated training. And so I met with our engagement manager and our executive director and said, you know, hey, how can we craft this? Can we. Can we use some of these AMS hours that essentially are languishing to do like a knowledge transfer or a training? And we're not going into the weeds of, you know, how do you fix a condition rule on a business process? But these were folks who were coming from different systems because we inherited HR analysts, we inherited, you know, reporting gurus who had built out reports in bi and so they understand the concepts of reporting but don't have a clue how to do anything on workday. And HR partners who just didn't even know how to navigate workday to help support their employee base. So we came up and for each module we basically created a one-on-one course. And we started at the very basics, workday navigation. Right.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:27:37]:
What does the three little dots related actions button mean? Right. What does. You know, I still remember our days when we went live and it was referred to as the Twinkie button. You know, so even things like that of, you know, how do you find a record when it's hyperlinked? What does that mean and how can you drill into it? What's the high-level concepts of, you know, relational security so that folks understand why the HR admin can see these details, but the HR partner can just see a smaller subset. Right. So really getting them comfortable with that and they had systems experience from navigating their own HRIs, but how to sort of translate that and even some of the language, right. And words that are very common to workday customers and are not common to others and they didn't have test tenants to work in. So the fact that we would do things in, you know, Impulse and Impulse four and Sandbox and Sandbox Preview just blew their mind.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:28:37]:
So there was even some of that, right? What Sandbox mean and why is it refresh every week and how do we kind of work through that? You know, why do we say get something done in Prod on Fridays by Friday, so it refreshes down into Sandbox. So we did lots of that. And this was, it was such a creative solution. We didn't have time to send people to, to true formal training because these are the same folks who were helping us convert, validate data, you know, support the business as we're, as we're going live. And so this was a great creative solution where I really feel like ERPA said, we hear your problem, we hear where you're trying to get, let us figure out how to get you there and how to do it fairly quickly. And so we recorded all of the sessions. So between the guides and the recordings and the other thing, I think that was important and they were very open to this. So I said, can we do this in one of our test tenants where we have this acquisition data that is familiar to these folks.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:29:34]:
Right. If they look at a record of a, of a classic Flexer and they don't know the person or the situation, it's, it's no different than looking in a GMS tenant. Right. So we did most of this in a Flexera tenant using acquired data, acquired employee data that was familiar to them. And so they understand like, oh, I get it right? This person and this manager and I see what happens. You know, this is what a leave of absence looks like, even things like that. Right. So this was again super creative, high value, you know, resources that they can go back to.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:30:08]:
We're still wrapping up some of the final bits of our conversion on things like absence and historical and they're referring Back to these trainings, and again, it introduced them to, you know, our top 10 reports that we use all the time and got them familiar with that. So this is, again, a great example of ERPA being flexible and collaborative and truly partnering.
Jeff Miller [00:30:29]:
Yeah. It's knowledge transfer as a timely, creative solution and. Yeah. And the algorithm that was used to get to that solution quickly, I love that. And you've mentioned flexibility a number of times. Whether you know it or not, we have four core values as a company at ERPA, and one of them is agility. So we do like to think of ourselves as agility. It's great to hear you bringing very concrete examples to bear on that value that we hold dear.
Jeff Miller [00:31:00]:
So this acquisition, very complicated, very layered, and I love what you said earlier. No two acquisitions are the same and you are the expert on it. You've been through a number of them. How does having you touched on this briefly, but I'd love for you to tease a little bit more. How does having a partner like ERPA change the landscape when you think about future potential acquisitions?
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:31:23]:
The lessons learned that we've learned together as a group. Right. That we worked through the challenges and some of the pain points together. And I can't say it enough, but the named resources, which I know is key to ERPA and is a key value prop that you guys bring to the table. But again, as someone who has been working with AMS partners for 20-some years, ERPA is the one partner where I really feel that. That you really show up with that. Right. With the named resources, with the same folks.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:31:57]:
So I know that when we do our next acquisition, we collectively will say, remember how we did this for the one last year? We need that. But also this. Or here's a lesson learned, right? We converted time off absences as of a point in time, which made sense at the time. And then retrospectively, we had these other challenges. So how do we learn from that? It's almost like what we talked about in the beginning. If you log a ticket and a random stranger picks it up. Right. We won't have a random stranger for our next acquisition.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:32:27]:
We'll have you guys, and you're in it with us. For. For better or for worse? Mostly for better. Some days. Some days it feels like for worse. You know, that's also where, you know, having fun with our teams comes in. You know, we, you know, we do weekly calls and sometimes more than once a week calls for very specific things. We all get on, you know, our teams meetings, and we compare teams backgrounds and we understand that ERPA is fantastic at creating bespoke quality backgrounds.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:32:56]:
So we even scheduled a meeting for Monday just because we can't wait to see what the Veterans Day team's background is. It's silly things like that too. And it's, we do lots of work together and having ERPA as our partner and being ready for the next one, we know it's going to be a lion's share of work. But we also have that reduced anxiety knowing that we're doing it with friends, with people who've been through it with us, and that we know that we can say, we can be a little more loose, right? We don't have to be stiff buttoned up and formal. And we can say, remember the circus that happened when we did xyz? We're not going to do that circus again. And we'll know what we're talking about and we'll laugh and I'll have a small moment of PTSD and then we'll get over it and move on. And so I think that is, is it truly, as you talked about this before, it truly is partnership that you hear the word a lot, but until, you know, push comes to shove and it really shows up, it's just a word. And we don't feel like that's the.
Jeff Miller [00:33:53]:
Case with the ERPA, what you're describing. I often will use the expression it's a relational approach to service delivery. And that relational foundation that's formed between your team and the ERPA team that you work with so closely becomes so critical when there's deadlines, when there's high anxiety, as well as when there's not deadlines and not high anxiety. And you can simply have fun together and reflect back on some of the battles that you've fought shoulder to shoulder. So again, thanks for the concrete examples. I'm going to shift now a little bit away from the acquisition topic now to staff Aug. So you had some staff augmentation needs as I understand it this year as well. What led to this need? And if you would, how did you solve for the challenge?
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:34:42]:
So I had the benefit of knowing that my team member, my 100% Workday-focused person, would be going out on maternity leave.
Jeff Miller [00:34:51]:
Oh, it was that person.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:34:52]:
It was that person.
Jeff Miller [00:34:53]:
It was that person.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:34:54]:
So my one person, my workday admin, my Ride or Die, was going out on maternity leave and I could not be more thrilled for her and for her husband and for the family that they were making. But I would lie if I would be lying if I said there was a part of me that didn't think, really, now we're doing the acquisition, like timing, which of course it's me purely being selfish and just thinking about this in my project manager brain, right? We do not have resource bandwidth to lose a resource. And so again, I did have the benefit of knowing that this was going to happen, so which not everyone does, right? And certainly, you know, things can happen and folks go out on leave unexpectedly, but it gave me the opportunity to try to plan for it. And so this is one of those things that I built into that scorecard is we were looking for a partner and really planning for it. Having said that, I am confident that if this happened now and we had someone else go out on leave unexpectedly, something happens, someone makes a career choice and leaves Flexera, I know that we could fall right back to that and say, hey, remember how we did staff OG hours? You know, March through June, we need to do that again. And we need to customize and sort of, you know, change order, if you will, what our AMS contract looks like? You know, we had the benefit of knowing that in advance, so we did a little bit of a knowledge transfer. We talked about what are the things that my team member would own. And these.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:36:27]:
Some of this stuff was very tactical, Jeff. It was like, who's going to own the edit workday account task that comes in to the security admin box, right? Who's going to take lead on that? How are you going to know that? Like, are you going to monitor it? Do I need to ping you every time? So we worked out those sorts of things. And so we had largely a team of three folks who were, you know, anytime there was something that we needed, I would email or teams chat all three of them and the first person would pick it up. But they all knew what was going on. So it really was, you know, person A would pick up this ticket person and I say ticket. It wasn't even a ticket. Person A would respond to my team's chat and say, got it, I'm on it. Right? And so it was the ability to interface with them, just as they were an extension of my team and not have to log any tickets for that and know that someone would own doing the normal tasks that we do on a Friday evening or.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:37:21]:
And this was not just business as usual, day-to-day stuff. It was also we rolled out a performance cycle during this process and my staff member would have normally owned that. And so now the staff group did it, right? They did the reporting, they launched the task, they helped respond to employee queries. So it was fantastic and it was such a good experience. It was so much more seamless than I thought it would be. That even though we'd done so much planning for it, I honestly thought, this all sounds great, but how's it really going to work? And it did. So again, this is where I think if my team member announced tomorrow that, you know, she's headed out again, I'd be like, well, I will miss you, but we will be good while you're gone. So that, that reassurance for me was huge because that part was causing me a lot of angst about how were we going to do deal with the day-to-day while also doing the acquisition.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:38:12]:
And ERPA solved that problem.
Jeff Miller [00:38:14]:
So refreshing. But your team member is back and things are somewhat back to normal now. So your team, in particular, your team member, very knowledgeable about Workday. So how do you address the swim lane question? Or in other words, how do you decide what to do yourself, you and your internal team, versus what to rely on a trusted partner like ERPA to do on your behalf?
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:38:38]:
I kind of think of them in three different buckets. So Victoria and I are both super knowledgeable on workday, but there are also things that we just flat out know we, we don't know and, or don't want to know how to do. So integrations and complicated matrix reports, anything around that, it's a ticket, right? We reach out to ERPA, we get the help, we'll validate and do the things and understand like what do we need to do to get the integration there. But I am not writing code and I am not popping open an xslt, you know, and doing things in there. So that's a ticket. The second bucket is things that are new, enhanced functionality if we were going to implement a new module or something like that. But sometimes it's really just how do we do xyz, you know, we know that we want to get to the end game of this, but we don't quite know how to get there. I used to spend my days researching and spending time on community and trying to build things out in a test tenant or back when, you know, workday had their own GMS tenant, see what other people had done.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:39:35]:
I used to exhaust all of that before I would reach out for help because I thought I have the, I have the tools and the skill set to try to be able to figure this out or to get, you know, this far down the road. And with ERPA, I thought, you know what this is why? We have a partner. I maybe could get there, but they're the experts, they can get there faster. It's sort of like, you know when you think you hear that tinkering noise in your car and you don't know what it is and you're, you want to figure it out, but you know, the older you get, you think, I don't have time for this. And you just take it to the mechanic and let them do it. Right? You just outsource that. And then the third is just things that we just can do but either don't have the bandwidth for or it's not the right use of our time. Right.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:40:16]:
So some of these are very kind of base things like setting up SupOrgs or creating, you know, notifications. And we just outsource that, right? And we say, please go do this for us. And I liken that one to like having a house cleaner. Right. I know how to clean my house. That's just not how I want to spend my time. So I just kind of, you know, I outsource that. And the nice thing with, you know, outsourcing those things to ERPA is you don't have to do the thing with your house cleaner where you have to clean your house first before the house cleaner comes, right? No, we'll ask your PA for help and we, in some cases we will say, we know that this business process is a little messy and we've got a couple of bandaids on it.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:40:57]:
We need you to go clean it up and it's great.
Jeff Miller [00:41:00]:
And I love that you distinguish between the things you don't know how to do in Workday and the things that you don't want to know how to do in work day. That is brilliant. I don't think many people distinguish those two. And yet there is actually an important distinction between the two. And you were careful to lay that out for us in your answer just now. Thank you for that. That's so good. So those are all of my prepared questions for our conversation.
Jeff Miller [00:41:27]:
And again, great conversation, great energy. I love your answers. And, and again, I love the partnership that you describe that we share together. Is there anything else that you would like to share? Maybe something that you thought of ahead of time that you didn't come up in answering any of my questions. Anything you'd like to finish on?
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:41:45]:
I think the one thing that I would like to share is that we've painted a picture where our partnership with the ERPA is very rosy. And that is very true. It is, it is an excellent partnership. Every partnership and relationship has bumps. And so I want to also share that when we have encountered bumps, how we've worked through those together. I have an example where we had a resource who was very knowledgeable, but we did not work well together the way that. And I mean, not just me personally, but our team and the ERPA integration resource. It just wasn't a good fit.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:42:23]:
Right. We had different ways of working, we had different ways of communicating. It was unclear what had been done and what we were meant to be testing or when timing would happen again. I said I'm a very candid and transparent person. And so I went straight to the ERPA team and said, this is not working. Appreciate that this person is knowledgeable, but we need more than that. Right? This is not working. Here's how it is affecting my team, here's how it is affecting our timelines.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:42:51]:
We need to fix this. And ERP was so responsive, they brought in leaders from above to help understand the problem, found a different resource, got that resource up to speed and helped to make up time where we had lost on delivery. And that sounds like 19 tasks that happened. And it did not take 19 days. That was a handful of days from we have a problem to we have fixed the problem. And that is a response that it tells me that you guys value Flexera as your partner as well. Right. Which is very important to us.
Jennifer Matsuoka [00:43:27]:
And it is a different response than I am used to in my 20-plus years of working with AMS partners. So for that we thank you as well.
Jeff Miller [00:43:36]:
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.