FST Update

 

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Happy New Year!  Here at the start of 2021, Finance Strategic Transformation is not quite halfway through the configuration and prototype phase.  We’ll be in this phase until summer. (See the whole Phase 3 timeline on the FST website)

The team is currently taking feedback from the Customer Confirmation Sessions we in late 2020, and using it to build another iteration of UVA's workday tenant so we can have another round of confirmation sessions later this spring.  See more info on the sessions here. 

There will be lots of opportunities early this year and in the spring for stakeholders to get a look at Workday Financials.  There are plans in progress to deepen the engagement with the first round of Customer Confirmation sessions, including some video content and other opportunities to broaden exposure to the future state. For right now, you can see the slides from all of the Customer Confirmation Sessions in the Online Community.

In FDM news, the team’s goal is to have a solid structure on cost centers by the end of February.  They’ll be doing outreach to schools and units and socializing the structure, so that we can be sure all units understand the FDM basics.  The mapping tool for the FDM has been just slightly delayed but should be rolled out soon, and FST governance groups, as well as the FST project team, are meeting to review their cost center submissions.  Visit the FST Info Station for guidance on keeping up with FDM news.

There are six major decisions being discussed in FST governance circles this month:  requisition user access, data warehousing and trend reporting, per diem, Workflow control, receiving in Workday, and discontinuation of WebWire.  Remember that we keep track of these decisions in the FST decision log.

In all the decisions that surround our implementation of Workday Financials, it’s easy to forget that Finance Strategic Transformation involves more than just Workday.  FST is actually four parts;  Workday Financials, reporting & analytics, Adaptive Planning, which is the budgeting tool, and probably most importantly, Continuous Improvement.

The work the Finance Engagement team is doing to put together a future-state service model for UVAFinance is a great example of continuous improvement activity.  The Finance Engagement team is implementing Salesforce across UVAFinance departments to help make the customer service experience more consistent for our stakeholders, and to provide us with a more effective way to see problems as a whole, taking into account how different departments touch the processes in question, rather than trying to solve them in a siloed way. Read more about that here on the blog!

Another one of the four parts of Finance Strategic Transformation is the implementation of Adaptive Planning, Workday’s budgeting tool.  Last year, UVA started using Adaptive for its budgeting process.  The Adaptive team is currently working with stakeholders on a budget process redesign, pivoting from the 2.0 version of Adaptive Planning from last year to the 3.0 version that will integrate with Workday Financials and the new FDM.

Adaptive Planning offers us so much more than the shadow systems and excel spreadsheets we’ve become accustomed to for years.  The team moves through the budget process redesign, they're focusing on replacing the outdated and inefficient processes with a more streamlined process that focuses on customer service and support of our end users’ needs.