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Transcription
ERPA | THE POSSIBILITY PERSPECTIVE | ANGELA HUDGINS
Episode Transcript
This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human.
Angela Hudgins [00:00:00]:
One of the things that was promised by our former partner on the AMS side was that they would teach us how to do the things that they were fixing for us. That I found never really came to fruition. It was just, you know, let's get the ticket closed, let's move on. That has not been the case with ERPA. We have gotten the answers we need. We're on our road to being more self sufficient down the road. And that's what we wanted to get out of this partnership is, you know, to not have to rely on a third party for everything that we're doing, and I have found that ERPA is very much geared toward that same mentality, to not have to rely on a partner for the long term.
Jeff Miller [00:00:40]:
Hello friends, I'm Jeff Miller from ERPA and you're listening to The Possibility Perspective, the show where we talk to strategic-minded Workday customers who partner with ERPA for a better Workday experience.
Jeff Miller [00:00:55:
Well, they just celebrated being live on Workday for one year and there's a lot to to celebrate. Today we're uncovering how Keystone Cooperative is getting the most out of Workday and why their future is just so promising. Joining us is Angela Hudgins, Vice President and CHRO at Keystone Cooperative. With Workday experience across more than one organization. Angela will share insights into her Workday journey and her partnership with ERPA. Angela will tell us about mission critical projects such as getting open enrollment right even with a new system and new employees. She'll share what beefy integrations look like and why they have to be built correctly.
Jeff Miller [00:01:37]:
And she'll tell us why you don't have to leave any Workday SKUs on the shelf or implement them yourself when you have a trusted Workday partner. Angela also shares how ERPA's core value of agility came into play during a very real need that she and her team recently had. It's a new partnership between Keystone Cooperative and ERPA and we're off to a great start. That's what makes the future so promising. Let's dive in. So Angela, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and then a little bit about the organization you work for, including your employee count.
Angela Hudgins [00:02:14]:
So my name is Angela Hudgins and I am the VP, CHRO of Keystone Cooperative and I've been in HR for about 25 years. Pretty much all I've done most of my adult life. And Keystone Cooperative is a farmer owned cooperative in Indianapolis, Indiana. We're based in Indianapolis, Indiana. We serve farmer members in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. We have about 2,400 employees and we do about $3 billion in revenue.
Jeff Miller [00:02:47]:
Fantastic. And you mentioned Indiana. I can actually see out your window behind you. We are deep in the middle of winter and I can see wind and some snow. I guess you had some snow recently?
Angela Hudgins [00:02:59]:
We did. We had about 8 inches of snow a couple weeks ago and it has not gotten warm enough to melt, so that is all still on the ground out there.
Jeff Miller [00:03:08]:
From sunny Dallas, Texas. You have my apologies for that. Angela, why don't you describe your Workday journey? When did you go live on Workday, and what do you like about Workday so far?
Angela Hudgins [00:03:20]:
We went live with Workday in January of 2024, so we are just now passing our year mark. When I first came to Keystone two and a half years ago, the HRIS change was not on my radar. However, after being here for a few months, I realized that everything that we needed to do to make our capability more strategic and more focused on higher-priority outcomes would necessitate a change in our HRIS. At that point, I went down the RFP journey and easily chose Workday. I had a relationship with Workday from a prior employer and got a very good demo from them, and you know, felt really good about moving forward with them, so we have been on it for a year now. During that year we've merged with another cooperative, so we doubled our size two months after we went live, which was not on the radar at all when we went live or made the decision to go with Workday, so very good decision on our part because it was a. From an HR point of view, it's pretty seamless transition adding all of those 1200 people in.
Jeff Miller [00:04:29]:
Very cool. So this is not your first Workday rodeo at this organization, so. And that experience probably was tremendously helpful with some of those first-year curve balls, so happy first anniversary live on Workday. Very exciting.
Angela Hudgins [00:04:43]:
We actually ordered crumble cookies to, uh.
Angela Hudgins [00:04:45]:
Oh, that's great.
Angela Hudgins [00:04:46]:
Memorialize the occasion. Yes.
Jeff Miller [00:04:47]:
Look at you. That's great. I'm really happy you memorialized that. That's awesome. Now you had a Workday support partner prior to ERPA. What led you to realize that you needed a change and why ERPA?
Angela Hudgins [00:05:01]:
We picked an implementation partner and had a very good experience on the implementation side, so when I was asked if we wanted to continue that support post-implementation, I didn't hesitate. I didn't look at any other options. It just seemed a natural progression that we would go from initial implementation to merger project to AMS support through this other partner about three months down the road. It became painfully obvious to me that there was different players on the implementation side than there were on the AMS side. And our tickets were not getting any momentum at all. We were really struggling to get the implementation off the ground, so we had to make a change.
Angela Hudgins [00:05:47]:
I was recommended ERPA by my Workday account representative and I met ERPA at an outside event last summer and it took a few more months before I was ready to pull the trigger, but once we did, it's the best thing that we've ever done.
Jeff Miller [00:06:02]:
Cool. That's so great to hear, so let's get into that a little bit more. What is your experience of ERPA so far? And it is still a very young partnership, so this is very much a how's it going so far in our early partnership?
Angela Hudgins [00:06:18]:
Yes, so we're four to five months into our partnership. It's been fantastic. Our tickets are responded to very quickly. We get solutions, we get explanations. There's really no ambiguity about where we stand with a ticket. We have weekly calls with our support team, which are just wonderful because we can get a lot of things answered during those calls that don't require emails going back and forth and tickets going back and forth. It's been a very beneficial relationship.
Jeff Miller [00:06:47]:
So good to hear. Now, one of the early projects that we worked on together was open enrollment, so how did partnering with ERPA make your first open enrollment using Workday at Keystone Cooperative successful for you?
Angela Hudgins [00:07:03]:
Not only was it our first open enrollment in Workday, we also had a brand new Total Rewards manager that had never done open enrollment in Workday and was only had only been with the organization for a few months. So she, she didn't even have the benefit of, of having gone through implementation and learning some of the the things that the rest of us learned, so the help from ERPA was, was just amazing. Our help desk person was able to work with our Total Rewards manager during the weekend, actually worked with her the weekend before open enrollment just to make sure that everything was going to trigger correctly and that everything was okay and lined up accurately. So in my opinion, that was going above and beyond. We would not have gotten that service from our former partner and open enrollment went off without a hitch.
Jeff Miller [00:07:54]:
That's great to hear. It's kind of an important thing. So that's really good to hear. Let's talk about integrations for a moment. You needed a pretty beefy integration built recently. Can you tell us about that experience?
Angela Hudgins [00:08:07]:
Yes. So we, we needed an integration built with Lincoln Financial Group. They provide us our benefits that have to do with short term disability, long term disability, hospitalization, critical care. They do a lot for us. They're a critical partner. And we needed a lot of different integrations built for a lot of different feeds for those, all of those different products. And it's not as simple as, you know, you just build one link and feed and you, you know, you're done. It's, you're basically building a feed for every line of product that you have for them.
Angela Hudgins [00:08:40]:
So we, we went step by step, line by line, and when we went live on January 1, we were able to have all of the feeds in place. Everything was working correctly, no, no issues at all. So that, that was a huge lift that ERPA was able to help us with.
Jeff Miller [00:08:54]:
Projects upon projects. Let's talk about another one. You had a couple of Workday SKUs on the shelf for a couple of months Workday help and Workday journeys, I believe. And after partnering with the ERPA, you decided, let's go ahead and deploy those. So can you tell us that story and how it's going to help with employee self service, which is really the, the secret sauce of Workday?
Angela Hudgins [00:09:20]:
We purchased Journeys and Help shortly after we went live with Workday. I did that because we were floundering bad with our, our partner that I thought, well, this will be a good solution. I was planning on implementing them myself actually, and I just became obvious that I didn't have the time. I couldn't get out of the weeds to even think about implementing those, so we, we had owned those SKUs for at least six to seven months before ERPA came into the picture. And right away they put together a separate scope of work to work on. Just those projects alone, you know, separate work streams, separate partners within ERPA. And we are about two weeks away from go live on both of them.
Angela Hudgins [00:10:04]:
So it's going to help tremendously because what we're hoping and I think is going to happen, is that people will be able to do these searches within Workday and get the answers they need instead of sending an email to our internal help desk, which just takes our focus away from getting more important stuff done, so I'm anticipating that it cuts down a lot on that.
Jeff Miller [00:10:27]:
That's exactly what you should be anticipating. Good news. Good news. Yeah. Right around the corner for you. Very excited for you, so one of ERPA's four cherished core values is agility. And you recently needed, I think, a significant adjustment to your contracted service hours with ERPA.
Jeff Miller [00:10:45]:
So can you tell us about that experience and how maybe it Served as an example of ERPA living our core values.
Angela Hudgins [00:10:55]:
Yes, we, about month two or three into our initial contract, it became obvious that we were utilizing a lot more hours than what we had originally contracted for. What I appreciated about our, our sales rep was that he suggested, you know, let's go in at a reasonable level, let's see where it lands. We can toggle from there. And that's exactly what we did. Within a day, we had a new scope of work in hand that I could sign that adjusted our hours so that we didn't have to pay that inflated price for the hours that we had already used that month, so it was a very easy process. And when we get to the point, I say when we get to the point where we can scale them back down a little bit, I've been assured that it's going to be just as easy to go back down the other way. So that was something that with our former partner would not have been possible.
Angela Hudgins [00:11:47]:
It was very difficult to get things moving through the different hierarchy that that partner had. And so I really appreciated the agility that ERPA showed in that situation.
Jeff Miller [00:11:58]:
Well, Angela, sounds like we're off to a great start in our partnership. It's only been a few months and we were able to cover pretty quickly a few pretty important projects that we've partnered together on to move you forward in your Workday journey. Is there anything else that we didn't cover? Maybe you thought of something and it didn't necessarily come up in answering any my prepared questions. Anything else you want to add?
Angela Hudgins [00:12:20]:
Yeah, I would add that one of the things that was promised by our former partner on the AMS side was that they would teach us how to do the things that they were fixing for us. That I found never really came to fruition. It was just, you know, let's get the ticket closed, let's move on. That has not been the case with ERPA. We have gotten the answers we need. We're on our road to being more self-sufficient down the road. And that's what we wanted to get out of this partnership is, you know, to not have to rely on a third party for everything that we're doing. And I have found that ERPA is very much geared toward that same mentality to not have to rely on a partner for the long term.
Jeff Miller [00:13:02]:
So good to hear.
Jeff Miller [00:13:13]:
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.