Exeter Finance fine-tunes performance with on-demand expertise.

Exeter Finance has helped more than 1 million consumers purchase   the cars they want by providing the financing solutions they need. Delivering competitive rates and services starts behind the scenes in the way employees work. This is why Exeter continually tunes up their operational efficiency, right down to the processes that support recruiting, benefits, and even payroll. Paula Blayney, vice president of HR Information Systems (HRIS), says, “We make all our workflows as streamlined, simplistic, and consistent as possible. Automating overhead processes for managers is especially important so they can spend more time coaching their employees.”

For years, Exeter has used Workday to manage its global workforce and improve employee experience. However, the company’s four-person HRIS team had little time to learn about new Workday capabilities that could eliminate bottlenecks. So, when the team discovered the planning, consulting, and networking options in Workday Success Plans, they signed up. “We are a self-sufficient team, but Success Plans nailed what we needed to be more productive and use Workday to meet our goals,” says Blayney.

A long-term plan that drives fast returns.

First, a Success Plans consultant held a Feature Adoption Workshop to discover Exeter’s operational goals, and then helped Exeter create a personalized roadmap by aligning their vision with existing and upcoming capabilities in Workday. Sam Siddique, systems integrations manager at Exeter, says, “As a team, we labeled capabilities as must, should, could, and won’t deploy, and then we prioritized the deployment of our must-have features based on business needs. We revisit our roadmap once a month and make adjustments based on new features, opportunities, and requirements.”

One of the first capabilities Exeter adopted was the Workday Request Framework because it could improve workflows for managers and HR teams. “In the past, we updated employee job profiles based on people’s email requests,” says Siddique. “Now we manage that whole process in Workday, from sending and receiving inquiries to making changes and closing requests. Centralizing and standardizing all these steps have made the job profile creation and updating processes easier, and more importantly, efficient. In addition, since all requests are housed in Workday, we can now easily report on past requests for auditing purposes.”

Collaboration is key in overcoming diverse challenges.

To network and learn from Workday customers in different industries, Exeter HR staff began attending Collaboration Crews, which are available through Success Plans. Trameisha Royal, HR analyst at Exeter, says, “Each week, we talk about a different topic, and that’s where I learned about the Value Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity [VIBE] dashboard in Workday. I was so excited because VIBE aligned perfectly with our diversity and inclusion initiative, and we could get the one-stop insights we needed to see where we stand today compared with where we want to be.”

After exploring VIBE dashboard options, Exeter reached out to Ask an Expert, which is a personalized consulting service in Success Plans. Blayney says, “We can solve many challenges ourselves, but with Ask an Expert, we don’t have to lose time searching for answers.” A Workday consultant showed the team how to log into the central admin tenant to load third-party diversity and inclusion data into their dashboard. The team then followed the VIBE guidebook in Workday Community to import the data that would give upper managers useful comparative insights from the dashboard and in reports.

Quick help for navigating unexpected bumps in the road.

Using their roadmap as a guide, Exeter’s HRIS team continues to tune their Workday solution and roll out new capabilities in weeks rather than months. And as questions come up, they lean on Success Plans. Devita Roberson, HR Information Systems manager at Exeter, explains, “My favorite option is Ask an Expert because it’s like having a friend you can always call to get answers or just talk through things with.”

Roberson gives the example of how the team could not determine why health savings account information was incorrectly generated for only some job offer letters. She explains, “We thought the issue was coming from how we were configuring Payroll or Benefits because they’re like sisters—9 times out of 10, they go hand in hand. Our Ask an Expert consultant showed us how to change a setting in Payroll and then run tests to ensure the issue was corrected. This is the kind of help we get all the time with Success Plans. Our consultants feel like part of our team, and we get the guidance we need to quickly deliver the greatest value to our organization.”