Workday grows retail footprint with Zumiez

International retailer Zumiez has selected Workday as part of a digital transformation designed to streamline systems and increase efficiencies. Zumiez hopes to accelerate its digital finance transformation to better anticipate and react to changing market conditions.

As a leading speciality retailer of apparel, footwear, accessories and hardgoods for young men and women who want to express their individuality through the fashion, music, art and culture of action sports, streetwear, and other unique lifestyles, Zumiez has more than 700 stores, including 602 in the United States, 52 in Canada, 54 in Europe and 13 in Australia. It operates under the names Zumiez, Blue Tomato and Fast Times.

With Workday, Zumiez will have the ability to plan, execute, and analyse and gain a deeper understanding of the business to help it manage through the changing business landscape. Digital acceleration comes in different forms, and for many organisations, replacing legacy systems all at once is not an option.

With the Workday Enterprise Finance solution, Workday empowers finance teams to deliver business insights and strategic planning across existing, multi-system environments with reduced disruption. The Workday Enterprise Finance solution provides customers with the flexibility to combine individual Workday products with existing financial systems or replace their entire financial software suite to accelerate their digital transformation.

For large retail organisations relying on operational enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for merchandising and manufacturing, the Workday Enterprise Finance solution brings this disparate data into a finance system built for the cloud.

With Workday, Zumiez will aim to:

• Leverage a high-volume analytics platform that blends financial results with workforce and operational data to provide better business insights
• Improve planning processes to help drive faster, informed decisions
• Streamline and standardise consolidation, close, and reconciliation processes, integrating information from multiple systems.

"As a retailer, we must always prioritise speed in serving our customers and quickly adapting to changing conditions," says Zumiez CFO Chris Work.

"Our success depends on our ability to successfully anticipate and respond to our customers' needs. By adopting industry-leading technology through our partnership with Workday, our finance and accounting teams will be better equipped to provide the business with holistic insights and company-wide planning."

Workday general manager of financial management, Terrance Wampler, says: "Strategies to digitise finance are accelerating to keep pace with the significant changes we've seen over the past year.

"We continue to see retail leaders select Workday to help achieve top-line growth and operating efficiencies by centralising finance and accounting in the cloud. Zumiez joins other leading retailers that are leveraging Workday's innovative and flexible financial planning, analysis, and accounting technology to better anticipate and react to changing consumer needs.

Last week, Workday announced its results for the fiscal fourth quarter and full-year ended January 31, 2021. Total revenues were $1.13 billion, an increase of 15.9% from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020. Subscription revenue was $1.01 billion, an increase of 19.8% from the same period last year.