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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.
Gwen Houldsworth [00:00:00]:
I've been really impressed by how ERPA can just jump right into our production, right, like our tenant and immediately start providing, you know, ideas or solutions depending on what the topic is, but just the efficiency and the knowledge of the ERPA team, their experience and their professionalism, just be able to kind of jump into any tenant and really quickly be able to do an assessment. It's pretty amazing.
Jeff Miller [00:00:26]:
Hello, friends. I'm Jeff Miller from ERPA and you're listening to The Possibility Perspective, the show where we talk to strategic-minded Workday customers who partner with ERPA for a better Workday experience. Imagine you're a non-profit organization that dreams of having all of your HR and finance data in one system. Could Workday be the right solution for you? Well, it was for Acenda Integrated Health. And as they approached their first anniversary live on Workday, they sat down with me to reflect on their journey so far. I'm joined today by Gwen Houldsworth, Acenda's Senior Vice President of Administrative Operations, and Kim D’Auria, Director of Human Resources at Acenda. With very little Workday experience on their team prior to going live on Workday today, they've realized their dream of having all of their data in one customizable system. Gwen and Kim will share how Workday is meeting their unique HR and finance needs. They'll also tell us how they're leveraging ERPA as their Workday partner, not only to support their software and complete projects for them, but also to grow their team's Workday knowledge along the way.
Jeff Miller [00:01:41]:
The important work that Acenda Integrated Health is doing in the world underscores one of ERPA's core values of of empathy. And perhaps that's why our partnership together is off to such a great start, but don't take my word for it. We get to hear directly from Gwen and Kim as they tell us their story. Let's get started. So, Gwen and Kim, thank you so much for joining us today. This is going to be such a great conversation. Gwen, let me start with you with introductions. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and the organization you work for and would you include also your employee count?
Gwen Houldsworth [00:02:15]:
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, Jeff, thank you so much for having Kim and I here joining you this afternoon. My name is Gwen Houldsworth. I am the Senior Vice President of Administrative Operations at Acenda Integrated Health. We are located, our headquarters are in Glassboro, New Jersey, but we have facilities all throughout southern and central New Jersey. We are an integrated health agency focusing on behavioral Health, so mental health. We also provide in home services, residential prevention services, basically, you name it and we try and do it. We try and provide that, that continuum of care for our clients and the families that we serve. And we have approximately 600 workforce members.
Jeff Miller [00:02:58]:
Fantastic. Kim, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Kimberly D’Auria [00:03:00]:
So my name is Kimberly D’Auria. I am the Director of Human Resources here at Acenda. And a little bit about myself. I've been here for about a year and I joined actually right before we went live with Workday.
Jeff Miller [00:03:13]:
Man, what a journey it has been. That's great. So happy to have both of you on this call. Gwen, I'm going to start with you on this. Would you. Why don't you describe that Workday journey for us? When did you go live on Workday? And then what do you like about being a Workday customer?
Gwen Houldsworth [00:03:28]:
Yeah, absolutely. So we went through the Workday launch express, so we started that journey October 1st of 2023. We went live April 1st of 2024, so it was just that six months. And we were, we were so excited. I mean, it is a ride, right? I mean, it is that six months is really, really intense. We don't stop our full throttle during that entire time.
Gwen Houldsworth [00:03:57]:
But we were so committed to this. We were so committed to the Workday product because through transitioning over to Workday, we were able to collapse a lot of our historical platforms so that our human resources and our finance department, we're really now, through Workday, we are part of one platform, so we are all talking to each other through Workday. All of our information, all of our data, all of our employee, our finance, everything is in one spot. And talking to each other through this single system, which is just so much more efficient and accurate than having multiple platforms trying to house all of that, that information.
Jeff Miller [00:04:37]:
So refreshing, isn't it? It's such a difference from maybe pre-Workday. By the way, it's not a laughing matter, but I always get a little giggle with customers who go live on Workday on April Fool's Day. So now, Kim, you, you joined the team in a unique time of that implementation, so tell us a little bit about your experience of your Workday journey so far.
Kimberly D’Auria [00:04:59]:
Yeah, absolutely, so I actually joined the organization in January and as mentioned, we went live April 1st. And so I got into the last bit of the implementation. I didn't have experience working with Workday prior, so it was a little bit of learning on the fly, I would say. And I'm ahead of the HR department, so I'm providing You know, guidance to about four teammates, so it was an interesting, challenging time.
Jeff Miller [00:05:27]:
So I want to stick with you, Kim, for just a second. You mentioned you're relatively new to the Workday ecosystem with now with Acenda. What does your internal Workday team look like and did your team have experience with or knowledge of Workday prior to go live?
Kimberly D’Auria [00:05:45]:
Our HR team consists of myself and four teammates. We have one that specializes in benefits, one specializes in our applicant tracking system recruiting. One person is the HRM coordinator, you know, somebody who, who takes care of really all the, the Workday files for our employees, and another person who, you know, kind of does it all, gets involved in everything. And myself also, who gets involved in all aspects of Workday.
Jeff Miller [00:06:13]:
Gwen, did you have experience with Workday?
Gwen Houldsworth [00:06:15]:
No, Workday was new to me. Obviously. We went through the sales presentations, the demos, but, but really, once we selected Workday, it was all brand new. And then of course, you know, during that implementation, during that Express launch, we were learning, but you're so focused on data and the configuration of Workday and having it kind of like, you know, meet your needs that I think the learning kind of happened after go live.
Jeff Miller [00:06:40]:
Yeah, it seems like that's the case with the majority of the team, right, Kim, that the learning took place during and after go live.
Kimberly D’Auria [00:06:46]:
Yes. And to Gwen's point, you know, a lot of it was focused on tailoring Workday to our needs, so we did have one teammate that had experience, but it was at a different organization. So her experience, while helpful, it wasn't exactly what we were experiencing when we went live. So, you know, she did have a little bit of, a little bit of background, but it wasn't exactly tailored to us.
Jeff Miller [00:07:10]:
Now you're all gaining great seasoned experience with Workday, so that's going to set you up for lots of years of success. So you went live on Workday April 1, and then for months you were on your own, essentially without a Workday support partner. What led you to realize that you needed a Workday support partner and then why ERPA and Gwen, I'll pitch you that question.
Gwen Houldsworth [00:07:37]:
Yeah, so again, no experience with Workday, right? So coming into this, you know, going through the launch, express and everything and then going live, I didn't quite realize during that process that we are our own system administrators. That was eye opening once that was realized by myself, right? So, you know, we have things like open enrollment, perform. I mean, all, all of these things that we have to do in HR, right?
Gwen Houldsworth [00:08:00]:
And I'm like, well, what do you, what do you mean we have to configure our own open enrollment? I'm like, don't we just give our benefits packages and everything over, over to the system administrators and they anything for us? Like what? So realizing that that was not the case. And again, I mean, as Kim said, I mean we have four people in our HR department, right? And we also have, you know, a finance department, but we have really limited resources here. We don't have the capacity with our, our current workforce members to dedicate to really having that like in house Workday support team. Because our in house Workday support team are also professionals trying to provide services to our workforce members and support our workforce members. So, you know, we tried, right? We tried to kind of fight the good fight and really try and, you know, wrap our arms around the needs of Workday, but we realized pretty quickly that we were going to need some additional support, so our CFO and I started looking around and seeing what some different options were and came across ERPA, you know, did some meetings, really felt that ERPA was a good solution for us because we have a ton of SKUs between EHR department and the finance department.
Gwen Houldsworth [00:09:19]:
We have a pretty large package with Workday and the resources the ERPA is able to provide to us as a one stop shop, right? There are some other options that are out there that we explored, but it was more like consultant, right? So they're like, oh, like, yeah, like I have, I'm certified in Absence or I'm certified in, you know, Talent or this or that, but ERPA has certifications in everything, which was really, really what we needed at that time. And still need. Still, absolutely, you know, still need. This is definitely a journey on our end for sure.
Jeff Miller [00:09:56]:
Yeah, you really need that module specific expertise with Workday. And yeah, I'm, I'm very proud of our ERPA delivery team that has the full benchmark. Um, it's interesting the way you said that, Gwen. You said, you know, we were like, what do you mean? What do you, what do you mean we don't have work. The administrators going to help us with all of this. It's almost like you have to add a page to several people's job descriptions. They already have full time jobs. They already are fully loaded with daily work and serving your teams.
Jeff Miller [00:10:25]:
And now you have to add an additional page to the job description to support Workday itself. The software, it is a lift for your team and you've got to find somebody who has the capacity to do it or you've got to think outside of the team. And I'm really, really pleased that you found ERPA. I love our partnership together. And speaking of that partnership, Kim, let me ask you this. In layman's terms, how would you say it? What does ERPA do for Acenda?
Kimberly D’Auria [00:10:50]:
Well, I would definitely say that ERPA helps us with our daily tasks, but also, you know, tasks that are bigger, like open enrollment we mentioned, and the performance evaluations for us, you know, the task, like you said, it opens up like one extra page on your job description. Going into the community and finding solutions for things is okay if, if it's like one thing here and there, but if you're starting out and you do something that's suggested by the community, it will affect other pieces. And that's. And I wanted to mention that when Gwen said that ERPA has multiple different platforms, which is great because I think we have six different modules at Workday and multiple times when we've asked a question about something, one of our consultants will say, you know, that touches on benefits or that touches on, I mean, there's a lot of interaction between the different modules. And that's really what was causing us a lot of problems. We might have fixed one thing, but it affected something else. We just didn't have the knowledge to know even where to look to find what the issue was.
Jeff Miller [00:11:54]:
Not many organizations do have that knowledge.
Kimberly D’Auria [00:11:57]:
Now we just put in a ticket with ERPA and, you know, they come to our rescue.
Gwen Houldsworth [00:12:02]:
And Kim, that's a good point too. I mean, I think also going through the implementation that we went through Workday came delivered to us, right? So a lot of our configurations are what that package was able to do delivered, right, Kim? So a lot of the tickets that you're putting in are also, and the teams are putting in that you're kind of helping to oversee and triage are focused on doing that fine tuning, right? And really having it configured specifically for us. Some of the uniqueness that we have as an agency and some of the requirements that we have because of that. So, you know, I think in addition to everything that you said, that fine tuning and tailoring it a little bit more than what we were able to get through the Workday delivered application.
Kimberly D’Auria [00:12:50]:
And also to talk a little bit about that, you know, things happen throughout the year that things change or you make a change here and you might say, okay, well this, this needs to work better. It's hard to determine those things when you're going through testing because you're like, we want it to work this way and you test it and it works, and that's fine, but it's like those tests are so independent of each other, and once you really start working in it, you just. You find a lot of things that you didn't think about before or you wouldn't know. You wouldn't know that this would affect that.
Jeff Miller [00:13:19]:
So, yeah, how could you know? Right? I mean, it's a big, robust system, and it's a big, robust system that serves thousands and thousands of organizations. And interestingly, Gwen, you said, you know, we need some things tailored. Every organization thinks that they're unique. The reality is they're all unique, that you really are unique. There has to be some customizable portions. And Workday is wonderful about this, but it requires a level of know how to be able to customize and tailor it for each unique organization's needs. So really good stuff. Appreciate all of that.
Jeff Miller [00:13:54]:
Gwen, let me ask you this. You've experienced lots of firsts since going live with Workday earlier, less than a year ago. How has ERPA helped you with your many firsts? Using Workday things like open enrollment or anything else.
Gwen Houldsworth [00:14:10]:
We were able to work, like lockstep with ERPA, you know, basically get ERPA, our benefits packages and say, you need to get Workday, you know, aligned with all of this. By the way, our open enrollment is in about seven days, so whatever you all need to do to make that happen would be much appreciated. And of course they did. Of course. Of course ERPA did and was very focused on making sure that everything was exactly, exactly the way that we needed it to be. And again, as all of us have kind of touched on, right. The fact that ERPA provides that breadth of services, right?
Gwen Houldsworth [00:14:47]:
Because especially when you're talking about something like open enrollment, you have the benefits packages, right? So you have the actual benefits that need to be configured, but then you also have all of the integrations and integrations with multiple vendors providing those benefit packages or those benefits to your workforce members, so all of the integrations also need to be working. And again, ERPA was able to kind of had all of those resources that you were able to bring to the table to accommodate all of our needs and make it really, really smooth and seamless for Kim, me and the HR team, as well as the finance team.
Jeff Miller [00:15:28]:
Great to hear. Kim, you were going to add something.
Kimberly D’Auria [00:15:30]:
Yeah, I think our first big project with ERPA was the open enrollment. And we were a little bit worried about the open enrollment because it was coming up quickly and we just didn't know where to start. So we were so pleased with our open enrollment this year. We had very few, you know, issues, and the workforce members gave us compliments on how easy it was to go through the process. And all that stuff was on the back end with ERPA. I mean, they set it up so that we could have this smooth open enrollment. The other thing that I wanted to mention is that when you open a ticket with ERPA, we mentioned we don't know how to do these things. This is the first time that we're doing some of these things for the year.
Kimberly D’Auria [00:16:10]:
There is an option for them to do it for you if you want it quickly. There's also an option for them to do it and show you how. Or there's a third option if you want to do it yourself and they can guide you through the process. And I find that so helpful because not only are we with a provider that's helping us set these things up, we are learning as we go along. And there's just no way for us to know all this stuff in the beginning, but we are being set up for success, you know, continually, like, learning all of these things. So in the future we'll know these are the steps in order to do this, or if I do this, you know, it's going to affect our open enrollment this way. So we're learning a lot.
Gwen Houldsworth [00:16:48]:
Kim, that's also great for like, the sustainability piece, Right? Because, like, as we're learning some of these, like, everyday tasks and we're kind of like, you know, becoming more sufficient and like, our knowledge base is increasing with some of these smaller things that we can rely and we can start focusing with ERPA on more of, like, the larger projects that we need to do. So, yeah, I mean, the multiple options available through ERPA is really, really beneficial for all of our team members and definitely helps increase. It's like that on the job training as well.
Jeff Miller [00:17:19]:
Yeah. It's not just do you rely on a support partner to do Workday for you or do you keep all the knowledge internal? Well, maybe there's a hybrid situation here where you grow your internal team's knowledge by working with a partner. And it sounds like you guys have hit that. That sweet spot. So, Gwen, another project in Workday had to do with performance evaluations and the need for some customization. We talked about tailoring and customizing Workday setup, especially as it relates to setting up workflows. Can you tell us about that?
Gwen Houldsworth [00:17:53]:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. This was actually really fun, so we had worked through implementation to get some of the preliminary content up and running in Workday, which absolutely 100% was, it was ready for us, but learning how to access the information and push it out the way that we wanted and then adding in goals. I mean, this was just such a positive experience that we had with ERPA because not only were we working with ERPA and our consultant on the performance reviews, but this is one of those projects that we actually took outside of just our HR department. We pulled in some of our programmatics, some of our senior leaders to be part of this project and to sit in the calls and to sit on the project with us and ERPA so that we could make sure that we were capturing everything that needed to happen to have this be a successful launch for our annual performance reviews and to make sure from everyone's lenses that we, we weren't missing anything, right? That we were really setting ourselves up for success, which really took everyone's voice being included in that. And I mean, our ERPA consultant for this was amazing. He was so open to working with, not just us, very, very flexible with pulling in our senior leadership and, you know, listening to everyone's lenses, but then also being like, you know.
Gwen Houldsworth [00:19:17]:
Cause sometimes you're like, okay, this is what we need to do, you know, and then he had to be a little bit creative and innovative to be like, okay, this is what I think I'm hearing. Is this accurate? Just give me like 24 hours. Let me get you with a couple of different solutions and then you all can kind of let us know which option you want to move forward with, so it was just a really positive collaborative experience. And I have to say this is another one of our larger projects that we got a lot of positive feedback from here internally at Acenda with our workforce members, you know, very, very minimal glitches, very, very minimal concerns as we walk through that process. We put the time in to set things up to go as smoothly as possible and ultimately that's what happened.
Jeff Miller [00:20:01]:
Kim, I'm assuming you had a front row seat to that one as well. Anything to add there?
Kimberly D’Auria [00:20:05]:
Yes, very user friendly for our workforce members, the performance evaluations. And one of the things that I liked about that process as well. Gwen mentioned that, you know, while we were going through the process, our ERPA consultant gave us a lot of different options, you know, things maybe that we didn't think of. And, you know, even after touched base with us to make sure everything was going all right, if we needed extra support, and gave us some ideas for next year for process improvement, I think in that Case, you know, we were trying to get it out in a certain time frame, but gave us some information about, you know, yes, we can do it this way, but, you know, this might be something that you could look at for next year. So I thought that was really, really helpful and beneficial and just such a great experience working with him.
Jeff Miller [00:20:54]:
It's a partnership, right? And that's what a partnership does. You're really looking after one another's best interests. And one of the things I love about the Workday ecosystem and the partner ecosystem, the Workday partners, is we, ERPA, as an example, we have a view to dozens, hundreds of customers, Workday tenants, and how they configure their tenant, how they use it, and best practices and things that have been tried and not worked so well and other things that have been tr. Have worked very successfully. And so I love that we can bring that breadth of experience to customers and then allow you to make the ultimate decision, right?
Jeff Miller [00:21:30]:
Obviously, for customizing and tailoring your Workday instance to benefit you the best. So such a. That's what a partnership is. Again, it's such a good relationship.
Kimberly D’Auria [00:21:40]:
Yes, absolutely. And I, and I think that our experience with all of the consultants really is very knowledgeable. They've given us some things to think about. They haven't just addressed one thing, but they're very knowledgeable and given us, like, the big picture.
Jeff Miller [00:21:52]:
So let's talk about that knowledge transfer again. And, Kim, you touched on this earlier, this notion that when you submit a ticket, it gives you some options. You can select and, like, choose your own adventure. Do you want to go down this path by yourself or do you want to. Do you want to learn how to do it or do you just want to hand it off to somebody else? Are there any other examples of leveraging ERPA's expertise through that ticketing system process where you've said, you know, as a team, we really do want to learn some of the steps involved in this project. While this project is actually being done by ERPA, are there any other examples you can provide there, Kim?
Kimberly D’Auria [00:22:29]:
When we first went live, we had to kind of prioritize what we were going to work on first. And it is the HR team and finance team, you know, working and putting in tickets, so we've kind of worked together to see, you know, what, what kind of things we're going to work on. And then when you have something that's an immediate need, you can put in, I think it's called blocker. You can put in a. You know, I have this Immediate need and the Workday consultants will address that immediately. You can put in a ticket that would, you know, something that we want to do, like one of these bigger projects and we'll give a deadline, so there's a lot of different options to choose on.
Kimberly D’Auria [00:23:05]:
You know, if it's something that you want immediately or if it's something that you're looking for a long term solution. You know, maybe between HR and payroll, we have a lot of business processes that affect each other and sometimes you'll put it in for HR, HCR, HCM, and they'll bring in other people from finance to also support so that whatever changes we're making, it is beneficial for all of the different modules.
Jeff Miller [00:23:29]:
Cool. Anything to add there, Gwen?
Gwen Houldsworth [00:23:31]:
Kim, I think you and the team have used a couple of times where it really just has been like that, that knowledge, right? So put it in a ticket just to kind of learn more about a functionality of something. And I think the document project is one of those, one of those examples that I was thinking, right. It started off as really just, just talk to us about some of the different functionality and the different options that are available. And then we went back and did some research. Do you want to talk a little bit about the document project?
Kimberly D’Auria [00:23:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. So with our employee files, there's a lot of different places to put things. So we want to make sure that we're putting them in a location that we can have reports. Like if we put it here, you know, how can we run a report out of there? Will it show the due dates, those kind of things? And I think that we just didn't have the knowledge going into it about where to put things. So we had put in a ticket with ERPA and they're helping us put our documents where we need them so that when we need to run a report or when we need to know if something has expired, we'll be able to do that easily.
Jeff Miller [00:24:34]:
Well, I love our partnership together and this has been a refreshing conversation because our partnership is relatively young, right? And yet the future is pretty bright. We've been off to a really good start together in this partnership. Gwen, I'll start with you. Is there anything that you want to add that perhaps you had thought about before, but it didn't come up in answering any of my questions? And then, Kim, I'll see if you have anything, any final thoughts that you'd want to add. And by the way, no is an okay, is an okay answer.
Gwen Houldsworth [00:25:01]:
I mean, I guess over and above what we've already kind of discussed. I mean, I mean, just kind of reiterating your point, right. I mean, it's been a fairly short relationship so far. I mean, in the scheme of things, right, but I've been really impressed by how ERPA can just jump right into our production, right, like our tenant and just really, really quickly be able to like assess the current status and immediately start providing, you know, ideas or solutions, depending on what the topic is, but just the efficiency and the knowledge of the, the ERPA team, I mean, I can't even imagine. I mean, I know like, you know, ERPA supports, I'm sure, like multi, you know, million and billion dollar entities, right? And here we are a non-profit, but their experience and their, their professionalism just be able to kind of jump into any tenant and really quickly be able to do an assessment is pretty amazing.
Kimberly D’Auria [00:25:54]:
I would totally agree with that. And I think that in the beginning it was a little bit more like we need this thing done immediately. And now we are actually forming relationships with a lot of the consultants and they do remember, you know, what they had done last time or they make plans for, for the next time that we do open enrollment or, or different things, so I think that's pretty, pretty neat relationship. And it does make us, you know, feel good that we have this person that's dedicated to us. It's definitely not one of those things where we just feel like we're one of many. We feel the connection and they definitely make an effort to make sure that we have what we need.
Jeff Miller [00:26:34]:
Love our partnership together, so good. Thank you both. This is great.
Jeff Miller [00:26:47]:
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.