When Kainos listed as a public company in 2015, it had already been evolving for nearly 30 years. By the time of the flotation, Kainos (“fresh” or “new” in ancient Greek) was already a seasoned provider of digital services to an array of government departments and agencies. It was also operating a strong business providing healthcare providers with solutions to their digital needs.
Kainos has been a Workday implementation partner since 2011, helping Workday customers get the very best from their investments in our unique range of SaaS solutions.
Transforming finance into a trusted business partner
Flotation was the incentive the business needed to become a Workday customer in its own right, having seen so many of its clients benefit over the years. As Group Head of Finance Matt McManus puts it, “At that point in time, our finance operations were relatively reactive and we were quite siloed from the business. That had to change.”
Since implementing Workday, McManus reflects, “We’ve transformed the finance function to be really trusted business partners – and Workday has helped us in that journey.”
We trust Workday immensely because they look after security for us so we don’t have to.
Damien Taylor, Chief Technology Officer, Workday Practice
Building the business on accurate information
Kainos has delivered significant domestic and international growth over the last five years, both organically and via acquisition. According to McManus, “We currently cover a total of 22 countries, and all our operations are within Workday. That’s been incredibly important to us as a PLC, showing a single consolidated set of accounts and being able to have real trust in the information they contain.”
McManus is also quick to highlight the significant efficiency gains the finance function can now leverage. “Since we started using Workday Financials, we’ve been able to close our month-end books around 25% faster than before, and we’ve shaved two weeks off our external audit cycles.”
Such gains, though, are secondary to the big-picture aspirations of ambitious businesses such as Kainos. As McManus puts it, “There’s never a perfect moment to start a finance-transformation journey. Your business environment and the wider macro-economic environment will never stand still. So don’t wait for everything to be perfect. Make the change – and grow with Workday.”
A scalable platform for stable growth
Damien Taylor, CTO of the Kainos Workday Practice, has the key role of ensuring that a fast-growing division of the company with more than 700 colleagues is continuously supported in the face of increasing demand.
According to Taylor, “We’re a growing company – and that brings us the challenge of ensuring that we continue to grow, but not at a pace that causes the business to creak.”
This is where Workday in the cloud comes in.
“Having an elastic cloud infrastructure means it scales to suit the load on the platform,” Taylor says. “But that’s not the only advantage. Being in the cloud also saves energy, cutting costs and reducing our carbon footprint.”
Don’t wait for everything to be perfect. Make the change – and grow with Workday.
Matt McManus, Group Head of Finance
Helping the CTO sleep at night
Every CTO is continuously worried about data security and privacy issues. That concern is escalated when the company in question is a PLC. And it’s even greater when ultimately that business is also responsible via the services it delivers for its customers’ data security and privacy.
This is exactly the situation Taylor is experiencing. But, as Taylor says, “We trust Workday immensely, because they look after security for us so we don’t have to.”
That is not where the company’s reliance on Workday security infrastructure ends. As Taylor continues, “We now have more than 350 customers using our products in the Workday ecosystem, which expresses our total confidence in its inherent security.”
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