Company: Workday, Pleasanton, CA
Company Description: Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for human resources and finance. Founded in 2005, Workday delivers human capital management, financial management, and analytics applications designed for the world’s largest organizations. Hundreds of companies, ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 enterprises, have selected Workday.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Financial Management Solution

Nomination Title: Workday Financial Management - Update 18

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 525 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

Workday has created the next generation enterprise financial management solution. Built from scratch and delivered in the cloud, Workday Financial Management was built for today’s and tomorrow’s finance needs – a system with a strong accounting core that can also provide the operational visibility, speed, and agility required to keep pace with an increasingly changing regulatory and business environment.

The world of finance has changed dramatically in the last 10 years for several reasons – business moves faster, more companies are global, regulatory requirements continue to increase and CFOs are being called upon to provide more strategic advisement. Legacy ERP systems created back in the late 1980s and early 1990s were not designed to keep up. Workday built a financial solution that enables businesses to move faster, smarter, and easier. Today’s finance organizations need more than just the numbers; they need real-time insights into the business.

Using in-memory technology, Workday embedded analytics into its financial applications empowering business users throughout the company with real-time visibility into the business. This is possible through an innovation called Worktags, which work similar to the consumer concept of tagging. Gone are rigid code blocks that have previously restricted accounting. Every aspect of finance, whether a revenue number, customer segment or line of business, is an object that has different business dimensions assigned to it – Worktags – enabling flexible analytics on any business area.

Workday Financial Management also empowers businesses to move faster. The application is easily configurable, so companies can quickly make adjustments when business and regulatory changes occur, without the cost or complexity of a customization. Workday also enables companies to close the books in days versus weeks through real-time consolidation, elimination and adjustments. Workday is built to be agile and evolve as the business does, even after deployment.

Traditional systems require companies to go through complex and costly upgrades for new functionalities, resulting in many companies not upgrading their systems and falling behind. Workday’s cloud delivery model provides customers with innovative new features three times a year with no heavy lifting or cost to the company. Workday takes a mobile-first approach to its technology, building mobile into applications from the start, so that users can access financial data when and how they need it, from a streamlined and intuitive mobile design.

Fifty customers, spanning midsized companies, universities, local governments, and large enterprises, have selected Workday Financial Management, including AAA NCNU, Life Time Fitness, TripAdvisor, Brown University, and the University of Rochester.

In 2012, Workday added significant functionalities across the product, arming businesses with greater business insight, collaboration tools and reporting abilities. Features included:

• Automatically combining financial and HR data on management reports, enabling businesses to view workforce through a financial lens and finance through a HR lens
• Built-in collaboration providing a user experience similar to popular social networking sites to document conversations around customers and projects
• Embedded analytics within business processes, such as an automatic price comparison of suppliers during a purchase requisition, to assist decision-making
• Dimensional balance sheets for business units, versus legal entity, allowing full investment analysis by product line, region, market, or other business dimension
• Project scenario planning

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Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Mark Nittler is vice president at Workday and sets the strategic direction for Workday's Financial Management solutions. Mark brings to Workday more than 20 years of broad experience in key financial application disciplines including accounting, ERP, procurement, contract management, compliance, and security. Mark's experience includes executive leadership positions in both product strategy and marketing, including vice president of application strategy at PeopleSoft, vice president of strategic marketing at Commerce One, and vice president of strategic marketing at Symantec. A California CPA, Mark holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley and a master's degree in management from University of California, Irvine.

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