Two major organizational developments were at the heart of Tysers’ decision in 2020 to replace the planning and reporting functionality used by its finance team with a new system that would be faster and easier to use.
“First, the centralisation of the firm’s finance function in the UK. Second, our U.S. owners announced they were planning to divest us, so it became essential to find and deploy a tool that would equip us with great quantities of historical information that could quickly and easily be provided to potential buyers,” explains Tysers Director, Revenue Control and FP&A Steven Horsler.
A sprint implementation to efficiency and agility.
Horsler joined the firm just as the impact of these key decisions was being felt. “Our legacy tool was not capable of the efficiency and agility we needed, so the search was on for a more advanced replacement,” Horsler explains. “And Workday Adaptive Planning was selected.”
This was the precursor to what Horsler describes as a “condensed sprint,” first to get a new general ledger tool up and running, closely followed by Workday Adaptive Planning. “We were aiming first for reporting from mid-2021, and then the planning functionality for the 2022 budget. The timetable was extremely challenging, but we made it.”
We’re now very well placed to take advantage of the further benefits Workday Adaptive Planning can offer us.
Steven Horsler, Director, Revenue Control and FP&A
“Superb” support for straightforward implementation.
Despite the extremely tight implementation timetable, the Tysers team hit all expected deadlines.
As Horsler says, “I was new to the insurance world, and many of my colleagues had no experience of working with anything but the old system. It was a steep learning curve for everyone. But with Workday Adaptive Planning and OfficeConnect, we were able to quickly convert old reports into the new formats. It was fast and pretty straightforward.
“The complexities involved in the project were largely around achieving implementation in a way that was right for Tysers’ very specific needs,” Horsler continues. “But the ease of use of the Workday platform meant that our progress in the end was incredibly quick.”
Horsler is keen to highlight the support during the project from Tysers’ implementation partner Clear Plan. “Clear Plan was superb, despite some of the enormous complexities of our legal-entity and management-account structures,” Horsler explains. “Even if they’re not able to resolve an issue while on a call, they’ll always come back to us within 24 hours.”
When speed is mission critical.
Today, Horsler is still impressed with the speed of progress made over the early months of implementation. “It was incredible that by the end of 2021, we were producing all of our reporting packs out of OfficeConnect, and we had our 2022 budget uploaded into Workday Adaptive Planning as well,” Horsler says.
“The speed at which we were able to move was mission critical,” Horsler continues. “This was essential as the process of selling Tysers to the Australian AUB Group progressed. It would simply not have been possible to produce all the report iterations demanded of us with the previous tool.”
Since the sale, matters have developed further. “And we’ve certainly progressed from that point too,” Horsler says. “For example, while we’ve always carried out multi-currency reporting, we’re now also having to do reevaluations and AUB Group-specific reporting in Australian dollars too.
“What we’ve been able to do is create a constant currency “hub” by enabling a report to strip out any FX movements so that we can view an almost like-for-like P&L That would have been almost impossible with the old system.”
With Workday Adaptive Planning and OfficeConnect we were able to quickly convert old reports into the new formats. It was fast and pretty straightforward.
Steven Horsler, Director, Revenue Control and FP&A
Taming the complexity of Tysers’ reporting landscape.
Horsler readily admits that Tysers is not yet leveraging all of the benefits that it could be gaining from Workday Adaptive Planning. “I think the sprint implementation and then the move straight into the acquisition process have slowed us somewhat, but we’re now very well placed to take advantage of the further benefits Workday can offer us.”
These revolve around managing complexity. “Our landscape was such that to run reports previously you’d have to open multiple workbooks that were hundreds of megabytes in size because of the way they’d pull data from different sources,” Horsler comments.
“With Workday Adaptive Planning, you get just as much data but in a fraction of the size and effort. And we’re also benefiting from the ability to flip between web and OfficeConnect reporting.”