How do you make 22,000 customers happy at once?

You turn off your legacy platform and launch Workday .?

This week, MultiCare Health System achieved a major milestone by launching Workday, our enterprise management platform. ?After 29 years of being on our previous platform and after 2+ years of design and build, we launched the full suite of Supply Chain, Finance and HR modules, while doubling down on the opportunity to redesign our business process to maximize efficiency and leverage automation.

And the feedback has been incredible so far!?

From the mobile experience to the intuitive design, our staff are actively engaging with the platform and leveraging the virtual assistant for self-service and exploring the new capabilities that they previously relied on calling someone in HR, Finance or Supply Chain for.?With more than 30% of our System logging in/downloading the app in the first 2 days, we have set the stage for an awesome adoption experience for our customers, with minimal issues.

As a biproduct of this launch, our internal teams learned to collaborate virtually during COVID, think differently about the way we work and design for scale...and we are finally here.?

Three specific themes emerged during this journey that continue to pay dividends as we invest more in blurring the lines between IT and the business.

Resilience

Going through something like this is a bonding agent.?It forces hard conversations, shatters silos and makes deposits in our team’s trust banks.?It is this process that allows us to get to ‘yes’ in a respectful way, while ensuring everyone is pointed at the same objective.?Having a shared purpose is often the missing ingredient that acts as a force multiplier for teams to take on new and exciting things together.

There have been countless examples of our staff saying ‘yes’ to a new job role, a new way of working, getting out of our comfort zone and automating in support of working on higher value tasks.?This speaks volumes about the laser focus of this team and the willingness to give up ‘self’ for the great good of the ‘whole’.

While this is really difficult work when the team is co-located, it’s even more difficult when staff are remote as some have not had the chance to meet each other in person and are now located all over the world.?It was amazing to watch the grit and collaboration to bring this work across the line.

Technical Debit Remediation

Hosting an ERP and the associated third-party apps, integrations, etc. onsite is expensive, fragile and time consuming, particularly when the legacy ERP platform had stopped evolving.?

Moving to a hosted solution frees up our team’s time to focus on higher value work, but also allows us to leverage new features that are deployed to the platform ranging from fewer technical requirements and an evolving and elegant UI/UX to real time analytics and security enhancements.?As we lean more into AI and automation, platforms that enable time savings for complex analysis, data modeling and increased throughput are well received and are poised for tangible gains by removing monotonous tasks.

This was not IT project: It’s a Relationship Project

Foundationally, we designed the business model, governance structure and leadership of this project in partnership with our VP of HR Laura Edwards, J.D., SHRM-CP , VP of Supply Chain Jason Moulding and VP of Finance Jason Mitchell .?We spoke daily via a designated teams channel, we met monthly over a meal, we started learning about each other’s business and offered suggestions from ranging from org design and staff allocation to automation opportunities and approaches for adoption.?

Over the course of two years we pushed, prodded, designed and built in support of the organization we know we are going to become, not the organization we currently are today.

The foundation of trust had already been established with my amazing colleagues, but this project just dumped fuel on that fire.?Each one of these leaders showed up with no ego and full accountability to design and build their team structure of the future, with a complete and unapologetic bias for action.?This shared ownership ensured that this wasn’t simply an “IT project” but rather, a business-driven platform that changes the way we work in support of making each other better.

While this wasn’t my first ERP implementation, it has certainly been the best.?Now more than ever, when IT can partner with the business to drive meaningful business outcomes, IT lives into the promise of being an enabler for scale and maturation for their organization, while making customers happy.

Onward!