Putting Finance at the Heart of Business Strategy at Workday

“It’s an exciting time to be in finance,” says Robynne Sisco, president and CFO of Workday, the provider of financial management, human capital management (HCM), and planning software. When the pandemic struck last year, “everything paused, and like most companies, we didn’t really know what was going to happen.” Since then, Sisco and her finance team have applied new processes and used technology in new ways to sharpen the company’s agility and enable it to continue thriving, despite uncertainties ahead. Below, Sisco talks about the new pressures and opportunities being brought to bear on finance, the framework she built to accelerate decision-making, and how she and her team uses real-time data and analytics to accelerate decision-making across the company in this conversation with Matt Schwenderman, principal at Deloitte Consulting, LLP and leader of Global Workday Financials.

Schwenderman: What lessons have you taken away from navigating through the pandemic?

Sisco: The pandemic experience reinforced for me how important it is to be able to make fast decisions and how much we need new and different data than we’ve used in the past. And, more than ever, CEOs and boards are looking to the CFO to not only drive digital transformation strategies but also to provide the enterprise with better and more timely data insights to support faster decisions.
When the pandemic hit, we were fortunate enough to be using our own suite of core financial, HCM, spend management and planning products to support these needs. And we were actually in the process of changing the way we were using them. For example, we were moving to a continuous planning model, creating a more substantial decision-making framework, and looking at new and different data.

How did you put those things into practice?

Sisco: We made some important changes enabling finance to be more nimble and better able to respond to disruption. Chief among them was accelerating our implementation of a continuous planning process. Like a lot of companies, we had to start over and remake our budget once the pandemic hit. There was so much we didn’t know about the future that just creating a new budget wasn’t going to work. Moving to a continuous planning process enabled us to better monitor our transactions, our business, the industry, and our customers. We were able to develop and maintain a plan that continually adjusts so we can use the best, most recent information to make decisions as conditions change, using real-time operational and financial data for investment planning.

We were also focused on supporting customers as they navigated new challenges related to the pandemic. Within our system, we had already assigned every customer a tag associated with their industry, allowing us to analyze revenue and profitability by industry. Once the pandemic hit, we were able to pull in some external data and marry that with specific data about payment timing and the customer’s history using our analytics. We used that to create a dashboard that allows us to look at accounts receivable balances through an industry lens, which has given us more precision in assessing risk to accounts receivable and cash flow. We could then contact customers in the hardest-hit industries and discuss whether payment deferrals or other changes were needed. Customers have been hugely appreciative.

What are some of the critical elements of that new decision-making framework?

Sisco: It’s multilayered in that you need the broader infrastructure across the company to ensure coordination, but decision-making processes also need to be updated. We’ve got a cross-functional team of sales, marketing, operations, and finance that meets regularly to look at the plan and the outlook, including what we’re seeing in the market and how our results compare to projections.

Then, for matters we feel can’t wait for the next big meeting, the COO and I meet every other week to make quick decisions. If there’s an investment we think is important, meaningful and cost-effective, we can just make the call and move it forward. For example, we recently approved funding to accelerate some features on our product road map. In addition, we approved extra resources to make sure we can keep hiring on track across the company, given our goal to hire more than 2500 employees throughout the rest of our current fiscal year. This decision-making structure gives us the agility to adjust in a very, very quick way.

How have these changes brought finance closer to the business?

Sisco: They require more collaboration between finance, strategy, and our product organization. But finance has really been driving the process and the conversations, and we own the numbers and all the analytics that go into not just continuous planning but also any investment decisions we may make.

We’ve always been a unique finance organization because we use our own software products, so we’re very much engaged on a strategic level. We can talk about how we’re using our own products, so we get involved in sales cycles, and we act as design partners in our product road map decisions. But our more agile, faster decision-making mindset and processes have allowed us to help run the company in a way we hadn’t been able to before. We’re driving decision-making across the company using real-time data and analytics, which we use to create the conversations with the business that help to identify new potential opportunities. We are more in the core, driving the business and driving business decisions instead of being in a support role. We’re more proactive and upfront as a result of our continuous planning process.

How is Workday adapting finance’s talent needs and capabilities?

Sisco: We’re investing more in skills like strategic planning and long-range planning versus just forecasting and budgeting. We’re using a three-year horizon for our planning now, so we need to really understand the long-term ramifications of our investments.

When we interview finance people, even on the accounting side, we want individuals who not only embrace change but also want to drive change. That mindset allows us to push ourselves to innovate. One of the projects we’re working on is an end-to-end automation of the entire tax provision process—something I’ve never seen before as most companies largely run this process in spreadsheets. We have all the technology tools to do it, and the team gets really excited by it. But we need to ensure that our team is hiring for the right profile because when you’re trying to come up with bold ideas like these, a change mindset is critical.

How do you keep finance prepared for future changes and disruptions?

Sisco: Finance needs to be ready for any outcome. We model a wider range of scenarios than we did before, and that allows us to look at which metrics really matter. For example, customer retention was never an issue for us, as we’ve always enjoyed high retention rates, but at the height of the pandemic crisis, many of our customers were struggling, particularly in challenged industries. Moreover, our modeling revealed that high customer retention is one of the key drivers for reaching our long-term revenue goals. So, we magnified our focus on retaining customers during that period, making sure, for instance, that our team that handles renewals was much more proactive about talking to customers and identifying any issues early so we had time to resolve them.

Our expanded scenario planning also helps us identify the levers that really move the business. Which ones can we pull to adjust quickly? Whether it’s shifting hiring in different geographies, adjusting product investments, or another type of measure, that kind of thinking keeps us in the mindset we need to be in. Since we don’t know what’s going to happen, we need to stay agile. Evolution is no longer an acceptable path—it’s too slow.

—by Josh Hyatt, manager/senior writer, Deloitte’s CFO Program, Deloitte LLP; and Andy Marks, Deloitte Services LP, senior writer, Deloitte Insights for CFOs
 

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This article is part of an ongoing series of interviews with CEOs, CFOs, and other executives. The participation of Robynne Sisco in this article is solely for educational purposes based on her knowledge of the subject, and the views expressed by her are solely her own. This article should not be deemed or construed to be for the purpose of soliciting business for Workday Inc.

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