The challenges facing today’s medium sized enterprises are by no means midsized. For starters, many medium sized enterprises face steep challenges with financial resources and funding. Others operate in hypergrowth industries and need to quickly scale and expand. Still others face difficulties that affect their ability to remain competitive, increase profitability, meet new regulatory demands, and reduce operational costs.
At Workday, we have vast experience with midsize organisations across Europe, including Heraeus Kulzer, IMC, Baumann, OVO Energy, Northern & Shell, and Sky Betting & Gaming. We provide them with the tools they need to meet business challenges head-on, helping them reduce complexity, gain efficiency, and succeed in a constantly changing business landscape.
Whatever your challenges, this page explores the four key areas medium sized enterprises need to focus on to improve business performance.
“Just as Southampton FC has made significant investments in our players, stadium, and facilities, ensuring we have the right technology to support our growth is imperative. Moving HR and finance to Workday will not only allow us to digitise and standardise our key people and finance processes, but we now have a tool that we are confident will grow with us and meet our demands in the future.”
—Matthew Reynolds, IT Director, Southampton FC
Lay the foundation for success.
With the right technology foundation, medium enterprises can streamline processes to increase productivity, uncover resources, and run the business more effectively and profitably.
Workday offers one system for finance, HR, and payroll that delivers simplicity, productivity, and scale to your core business processes and your people. And its technology foundation puts you on the path toward more manageable, predictable, and sustainable growth.
Ask yourself:
- What does our technology landscape look like today?
- Does it provide a good platform or foundation to work from?
- Will it support where we see our business headed in the future?
”Workday fits well within our strategy, and by bringing HR and finance together in the cloud, we gain new levels of visibility into our company that help us make faster and smarter business decisions.”
—Jan Willem Kohne, Head of Europe, IMC
Make every decision count.
In a medium sized enterprise, the cost of a wrong decision can be much higher. There is simply less room for error. Because every decision matters—the quality of the data matters. Today’s businesses demand real-time, rather than anecdotal or stale, data. And analytics are only as effective as the quality of the data being used.
Workday captures all finance, HR, and payroll transactions, and combines them with core business processing, operational data, reporting, and dashboards—to deliver a single source of truth that allows you to turn insight into action.
Ask yourself:
- Do we have visibility across the entire business, with the ability to drill down where needed?
- Can we answer the questions our management team or investors are asking?
- Do we pay people on time and in compliance with local regulations?
- Can we effectively plan for the future?
”Out of the suppliers we reviewed, Workday offered the most proven system when it came to the features, information security, and continual delivery of new functionality required to digitalise our HR operations. We were also attracted by the high levels of satisfaction that other customers shared with us about their Workday experience.”
—Marie Ågren, Head of HR, Skandia
Protect yourself from risk and fraud.
Just like larger enterprises, midsize organisations must maintain compliance and stay vigilant against fraud. But medium enterprises may not have the resources or expertise to keep up with changing regulations or make sure that only authorised employees have access to sensitive information.
Workday helps medium sized enterprises adhere to the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), designed to harmonise the patchwork of data protection laws in Europe. The business process framework in Workday is a central tool that allows you to configure and visualise business process workflows and segregate duties across your workforce. Workday also helps prevent fraud by granting the right people access to the right information, and providing an always-on audit trail that monitors process and privilege changes.
Demonstrating financial and operational compliance, even as you work with internal and external audit partners, has never been easier. Medium sized enterprise customers, including Skandia and CPA Global, chose Workday in part because it contributes to their ability to meet GDPR compliance.
Ask yourself:
- Do we understand the implications of GDPR and can our current systems support this new legislation?
- How do we handle new regulations within the back office?
- Is our business making sure our teams are following processes correctly?
- How do we ensure that only authorised employees are able to access sensitive information?
Change with the business.
As your organisation evolves, the question isn't whether you will need to adjust strategies, it's when—and whether you can rally your organisation to take advantage of change.
Successful medium enterprises share some common traits. They’re agile. They’re able to react quickly to market conditions and roll out new products and services. And they embrace rapid innovation as a long-term strategy, not a short-term fix.
Workday gives you the ability to bring together data from key business functions to streamline processes and meet constantly shifting regulatory requirements. Using a single system for finance, HR, and payroll allows you to adapt quickly to changes in your organisation or industry.
Ask yourself:
- How well do our back-office systems communicate, and are they flexible enough to support our future needs?
- Can our business systems and processes handle rapid growth, whether organic or the result of an acquisition?
- Can our finance, HR, and payroll systems adapt quickly and easily when we change organisational structure, reporting units, or pursue M&A?
- Does our organisation need to support rapid growth or is improving the efficiency of our processes more of a challenge?
See the results.
Today’s medium sized enterprises face daunting challenges. Operating more efficiently, making better decisions, keeping up with regulations, and managing a disruptive business landscape are all key priorities.
Using a single system for finance, HR, and payroll, Workday helps you make better decisions, mitigate risks, and easily adapt to change. Simply put, a single system from Workday lays a strong foundation for success—today and into the future.