Improving operational efficiency and data accuracy with Workday

Challenge

Grand Traverse County, Michigan, wanted to modernize its administrative processes to enhance operational efficiency, financial management, and workforce capabilities. The county’s existing planning processes included many paper forms and lacked transparency of changes made from one annual planning and forecasting stage to the next. Without a collaborative platform, county departments couldn’t easily request new budget amounts, see transparent real-time data, or forecast revenue plans. County leaders knew they needed a solution for more than 45 departments to work from the same data model and have the flexibility to directly build and manage plans. 

Approach

We partnered with Grand Traverse County to implement Workday Adaptive Planning—a cloud-based platform for enterprise performance management—across its operations using our “GH+ Workday Methodology.” Implementing the Workday Adaptive Planning software would support the county’s financial planning, revenue planning, expense planning, reporting, and data mapping efforts. Our comprehensive approach was designed to help ensure that the transition was smooth and that county employees were prepared to capitalize on the new platform’s capabilities. Through the steering committee we formed, we provided overall deployment guidance across the planning, architecture and configuration, and testing stages. This included:

• Aligning with the county on the project’s scope, goals, and objectives
• Supporting system configuration, data migration, user training, and change management
• Facilitating end-to-end functionality testing, integrations, test scenarios, and the production dress rehearsal to make sure the county was ready to make a successful transition

Once the initial stages were complete, we were able to successfully deploy Workday Adaptive Planning using the county’s current enterprise resource planning software. 

Impact

The deployment has enabled departments across Grand Traverse County to optimize county financial management, resulting in improved operational efficiency and data accuracy. Each department can use dashboards that show the prior year’s budget, actual figures, and the current year’s request while seeing total budget amounts in real time. The county’s centralized budget team can now review budget requests, maintain version control to memorialize each stage of the planning process, and immediately summarize the entire county budget—allowing for a faster, more accurate planning process. 

Cumbersome reporting processes have also been eliminated with the development of real-time reporting. State reporting requirements in particular have been met by creating reports in Excel that can be updated each year with just a few clicks.

This transformation supports the county’s goal of delivering more effective services to residents. With our expertise at hand, the county is now equipped to make informed decisions, achieve long-term sustainability, and align with its commitment to transparency and responsive governance.