Not just a tech implementation: FST transformations in progress (Volume Three)

When you think about what Finance Strategic Transformation involves, you probably think about the Workday Financials implementation, and that makes sense! After all, it's the thing you probably hear about most often.

But it's not just our financial system that's transforming; in addition to the implementation of Workday Financials, the four parts of FST include adopting Adaptive Planning (Workday's budgeting and planning tool), enhanced reporting and analytics, and continuous improvement.

At a recent Steering Committee meeting, the project team highlighted some of the big transformations being driven by FST that highlight the innovation and continuous improvement sparked by the project. You can see those slides in the Community, but we'll also highlight those Transformations in Progress here in the blog, in a three-part series.

Here's our third and final round-up of examples of how changes are taking place surrounding FST:

• Customer Portal: the ability for external customers to view receivables aging and account activity while enabling external customer's ability to pull down pdfs of outstanding invoices for reference.
• Position Budgeting:  UVA has a future-state reporting goal for monitoring personnel expense by position, employee, and/or vacancy.  Reporting capabilities will give HR business partners ease of access to position information when requisitions are completed, as well as alleviating the finance organization's use of shadow systems to monitor requisitions and approved budgeted positions.
• Automated Bank Statement Reconciliation:  Reduction of manual reconciliation for bank statements through Workday matching rules.
• Award/Grant reporting for stakeholders at the Department Level:  Improving visibility into award/grant activities for grant managers and principal investigators through reporting and dashboards (grant budget vs. actuals, award tasks, etc.).
• Multi-Year Financial Planning:  Introducing a five-year multi-year financial planning process across the institution, shifting units from a "year-to-year" mindset to a longer-term, actionable, and strategic outlook.
• Budget Guidelines:  Creating budget guidelines to document all revenue and expense assumptions and owners, define budget philosophy, provide standard definitions, and reinforce policy.  This will also improve financial acumen at UVA.
• Simplifying UFM:  Simplifying the budget model to make it less cumbersome and to increase transparency.  Simplifying UFM will help make the budget model more sustainable and ultimately serve institutional goals.
• Internal Vs. External Reporting:  Analyzing how to transact UFM in the new FDM and the crosswalk between internal vs. external reporting.  This will increase transparency and accuracy in the area of expendable fund balances. 

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See Volume One of the FST Transformations in Progress here: http://uvafinance.blogspot.com/2021/06/not-just-tech-implementation-fst.html and Volume Two here: http://uvafinance.blogspot.com/2021/07/not-just-tech-implementation-fst.html

You can also see all of the transformations in progress in the steering slides in the Online Community!