How Workday's HR tools helped McMillan Shakespeare weather the COVID-19 storm

The recent months have created turmoil and uncertainty for many businesses, in how they operate, communicate to customers, and how they manage their employees. With people working remotely or relocating to other areas of a business, HR systems are in the spotlight.

There is no doubt that COVID-19 has highlighted the need for digital transformation and the importance of cloud in all areas of the business.

Those that had embraced digital transformation and moved to the cloud pre-COVID-19 had access to the data they needed to make the right business decisions. But those that were still relying on paper-based manual systems struggled.

McMillan Shakespeare Limited (MMS) is one business that was properly prepared to manage its employees through COVID-19.

MMS is a provider of salary packaging, novated leasing, asset management and related financial products and services, employs more than 1,300 people across Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

In 2018, MMS implemented Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) in order to meet business priorities in terms of compliance, financial reporting, and labour modelling across its complex and diverse organisation.

When COVID-19 struck, the company's HR transformation and investment in Workday allowed the business easy and effective access to the data it needed to make the right business decisions.

Workday delivered a critical new dimension in terms of transparency and employee welfare with the arrival of COVID-19. It enabled the MMS HR function to provide vital information to the business in hours — not weeks.

McMillan Shakespeare's group executive - human resources, Suzanne Shepherd, says, "When the pandemic hit, we didn't just know what state people were in, but in what office and on what floor."

"If we didn't have the right tools in place, we wouldn't have had the level of agility to give our executive team the data they needed to make such rapid workforce decisions — or text people within five minutes to provide them with critical information. Now we're using Workday to detail whether people are standing down or taking annual leave, which is critical to our FTE reporting."

MME also achieved benefits in terms of the level of and timeliness of reporting data complemented by associated cost savings.

"Within the second year of going live, we made significant cost savings across a number of facets of our work. The automation and improvement of the processes implemented, combined with the focus our HR specialists could put to value creative work contributed to this. For example, we could use our in-house talent acquisition expertise in a more intelligent, value-creative way. We now have limited reliance on agencies."

Workday Australia and New Zealand vice president Stephen Jack says, "We are proud that Workday is helping McMillan Shakespeare through the COVID-19 pandemic by providing the executive team with a single source of truth of data to make dynamic business decisions.

"We are also tremendously pleased that manual data entry and form completion are things of the past for MMS, removing double handling and freeing up HR resources to work on more strategic and value-adding projects. All this is being achieved with MMS already recouping more than the annual subscription in ongoing savings.