Workday and Aon

Laurie Meissner:  

Aon is a company that has come together as a result of many acquisitions. We had over 500 acquisitions throughout the late ’90s and early 2000s, and as we look at the span across the world, we're in 120 countries, we have over 500 offices—but what that meant from a finance perspective, as well as an HR perspective, is that we had no ability to drill down, in any way, into the detailed financial activities, financial results, or HR. I was being asked to run a global team without even being able to get access to data on my employee base in parts of the world. I could see my very top layer and had a lot of interaction with my top layer and maybe one layer down, so we at Aon knew that we needed to do something.

We selected Workday as we knew that we wanted to go into next-generation technology being cloud-based technology. I think the final piece, though, that was the clincher on why Workday, was that I now have the ability to go to a transactional-level tool that's able to provide analytics to my teams all the way down to the lowest-level transaction or the lowest-level colleague, if they need to, and gather that information—and by using the tool, provide meaningful insight into my business.

At Aon, it's important that we're a step ahead, thinking about some of the new risks that are out there. It's a challenging environment—innovation is really part of it. We need to continue to be ahead of both the risk side and the HR side of what companies deal with, what solutions they need, and how we help them face the risks that they face. Workday will help us as we look at innovation and the way we provide solutions to clients by first helping us look at our employee base. Workday is there, it's part of our operating model. I can now manage a worldwide organization.