Enabling institutional agility at Flinders University.

Flinders University had disparate legacy systems throughout HR and finance, including a legacy payroll and multiple systems and applications cobbled together to support HR. With numerous complex and manual processes, report creation was cumbersome and time consuming, leading to a poor employee experience. Even worse, the university lacked a view of its workforce and had data integrity issues and data errors. Managers were spending too much time on administrative tasks. The university urgently needed a modern, cloud-first HR system.

Strong customer satisfaction focus and an excellent relationship. 

Flinders chose Workday after asking shortlisted vendors to test the product in a sandpit environment with a user focus group. “It wasn’t just a test of the product. We were also testing the vendor relationship as well. We wanted to understand the type of behaviour we could expect in the middle of a project. What we learnt is that Workday holds its 98% customer satisfaction close to its heart. That was really evident—both in the sandpit and in an early test of our relationship during integration. The whole team bent over backwards to help us and work through this really trying time with us,” says Chief Information Officer, Kerrie Campbell. 

Flinders also liked the fact that Workday is a true SaaS service. “People say they’re SaaS and it’s a thick client that’s been made into a thin client. Whereas Workday is a true born-in-the-cloud service.”

Universal, streamlined business processes. 

Flinders used the opportunity to rationalize and automate its business processes, improving ease of use and removing time-consuming administrative processes. “Of our 93 new business processes, 90 required no more than two clicks. The other three processes, which needed three clicks, were financial processes. So we really made our business processes more lean,” says Kerrie. 

University staff had been used to cumbersome processes, where people had to complete forms by hand and fax them to the appropriate department. After Workday was implemented, none of that tedious work was needed and 25 forms disappeared. The project team also decommissioned 14 different applications around the payroll system alone.

HR transitions to a more strategic role. 

For Kerrie, one of the more important benefits is what staff members are doing with the time Workday has saved them. “We’ve got staff members going to one place and having that single source of information, so it’s way easier for them to do their jobs. Now those staff have a significant amount of additional work time, they can do higher order things. They’re working higher up in the business value chain, which means they’re doing better things for the organization rather than pushing around pieces of paper.”

Staff enthusiastic about digital transformation. 

Kerrie is also excited that the reaction to Workday has made university staff positive about digital transformation. “We really changed people’s mindset with this implementation of Workday. We went from legacy thinking to this really modern platform so now people have this expectation of our other systems. People keep saying, ‘Why can’t it work like Workday?’ That’s good, because it means they’ve come on the journey with us. It’s opened the door for us to be able to implement other new products as well.”