Planning and learning for life

Algonquin College is a publicly funded college with campuses in three locations in Ontario and an annual enrollment of more than 50,000 students. In recent years, the finance and administrative team knew it needed to improve the experiences of the school’s learners and employees. They discovered that the solution required migrating several core systems to the cloud. Part of this journey included building on the lessons the team learned from former Workday deployments. To enable the new transformation, Algonquin selected Deloitte to help implement the team’s chosen planning platform, Workday Adaptive Planning.

Download the case study

The challenge

The finance and administrative team at Algonquin College had been using an antiquated, home-grown budgeting process that was nearly 30 years old. This legacy system had become difficult to support and maintain, and it was no longer capable of informing decisions in support of the school’s mission. The team sought to develop and deploy a transparent, standardized budgeting solution across the entire organization. As they explored different options, Workday Adaptive Planning emerged as the clear front-runner.

The main objective of the project was to modernize the school’s budgeting, planning, and forecasting processes by deploying Workday Adaptive Planning and integrating it with Workday Financials, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), and the legacy student information system for enrollment data.

The transformation

The college’s finance and administrative leaders sought a service provider with extensive process knowledge, experience in the education sector, and most importantly, a strong local presence. They knew they wanted an implementation partner who could staff a local subject matter expert (SME) on site for the duration of the project. Deloitte quickly stood out as the candidate that now only had the requisite knowledge, experience, and presence, but was also both willing and able to make this commitment.

Bringing our deep experience, proven methodologies, and on-site leadership, Deloitte was chosen to help the college transform its budgeting, planning, and forecasting processes. The finance and administrative team’s leaders pointed to having a full-time Deloitte consultant working on site alongside dedicated Algonquin College employees as a primary success factor. This Deloitte specialist served as the project manager and solution architect, and quickly became an integral part of the on-site team with his creative problem-solving and his exceptionally valuable contributions.

The results

Within six months, the project team rolled out the fully integrated Workday Adaptive Planning solution to more than 250 users. As a result of this implementation, Algonquin College can now:

• Transition from annual budgeting to detailed monthly budgeting, enabling the finance and administrative team to analyze monthly variances against actuals
• Improve the speed, transparency, and overall quality of their financial reporting, budgeting, and planning, and therefore management’s decision-making
• Perform three-year strategic enrollment planning, enabling administrators to forecast domestic and international student enrollment for various schools and programs
• Refine their program-investment strategies by helping different schools to identify and analyze high- and low-demand programs

The college is also recognizing that there are many benefits to having its data and applications in the cloud and that each step in the digital transformation journey enhances the return on investment from the overall platform.

Being a global winner of the Adaptive Global Systems Integrator of the Year award and having achieved premier accredited services partner and solutions partner status with Workday Adaptive Planning, Deloitte delivered value throughout our commitment to working side by side with the Algonquin College team. The project marked the first successful implementation of Workday Adaptive Planning leveraging native Workday integration capabilities in the Canadian higher education sector, and Algonquin College now stands as a pioneer in the digital transformation space.