Transformco: Using finance data to modernize diverse operations
Transformco is a multi-faceted organization that includes a national home services organization, a significant real estate portfolio, and the modern management of iconic historic brands such Kenmore, Sears and Kmart.
While the company had built a strong a strategic vision for the future, its technology needed to catch up. Its legacy mainframe environment was first implemented more than four decades ago at a time when the company was more focused on its retail use cases. Transformco needed a system that could accommodate their growing vision and meet their needs on a global scale.
“We had a legacy mainframe environment that had outlived its effectiveness, along with the business portfolio it was designed to support,” said John Brennan, the senior director overseeing the finance team’s digital transformation.
The legacy mainframe relied on outdated on-premises technology that could no longer meet the pace of today’s digital requirements. Equipment was expensive to maintain and had incurred massive amounts of technical debt, while it became harder and harder to find IT talent who understood the outdated technologies as that generation of experts retired.
In addition, the finance team relied on a manual spreadsheet-driven process that could be unpredictable and error-prone.
“We had a lot of homegrown reports, so it felt like once a week that we would end up in debates about which spreadsheet was right,” said Dino Pezzato, the Director of Reporting and Financial Systems. “A lot of time was spent trying to validate data instead of using it to make decisions.”
Adaptive Planning emerges as the obvious choice
The CFO previously worked for a leading FP&A software company, and knew he wanted to modernize the finance department’s approach to technology. Using his experience with the market and the capabilities a best-in-class solution should provide, he led the team in an evaluation of several enterprise solutions.
“Based on his knowledge and expertise, we chose Workday Adaptive Planning,” said Brennan. “It gave us everything we knew we would need to improve our processes and meet our long-term goals.”
Kainos stands out
With its complex business encompassing several distinct lines of business, the Transformco team knew it would need to leverage a partner with specific Workday Adaptive Planning implementation and optimization expertise. Kainos has a global team of experts specializing in tailor-made solutions in Workday.
“Kainos came highly recommended, and has been the ideal partner,” Brennan said. “They did an amazing job of taking the time to learn the unique aspects of our business. Not only were they able to do everything we asked of them, but they helped us plan and execute ideas we wouldn’t have known to ask for. They then trained our staff on how to maximize our use of Workday Adaptive Planning so we could take true ownership of the tool.”
Partnering from a place of understanding
Kainos worked with the Transformco team to understand their current processes, rebuild those processes as needed in Workday Adaptive Planning, and offer improvements based on Kainos’ experience working with other multi-faceted organizations. This helped the finance team easily transition away from its legacy technology and spreadsheets to work more effectively.
“Kainos really took the time to understand the business, our goals, and needs of individual teams to get the buy-in that is crucial for any new technology implementation,” said Pezzato.
Transformco was able to start using Workday Adaptive Planning in less than five months after selecting the solution with Kainos partners.
“We replaced 30 years of reports and were able to produce our board materials without worry. There isn’t anything that anybody needs that we haven’t been able to provide,” said Pezzato. “At the same time, Kainos was answering all our questions from the people who would be writing reports in the future so that we’re prepared to use the tool to its fullest extent without requiring support.”
With Workday Adaptive Planning, Transformco is using its financial data to manage and understand its business better.
“We now know what reports we have, how those reports are structured, and who is accessing those reports. If something needs to change, it gets changed once instead of in 19 different spreadsheets. Our data is up-to-date, it's consistent, and it’s leverageable,” Brennan said.
In addition to implementing Workday Adaptive Planning, Transformco simultaneously worked with another vendor to upgrade its ERP. Kainos worked with Transformco and the ERP implementation team to ensure the two systems integrated seamlessly together, creating the structure required in Workday Adaptive Planning to leverage summarized data for localized and enterprise-wide management reporting, legal reporting, and board reporting.
“Kainos made sure we understood what the common reporting elements were, what feeds and connections we would need, and how to make changes to data back at the source as needed,” Brennan said.
What's Next?
The Transformco finance team is now empowered to better engage and guide their partners across the business thanks to Workday Adaptive Planning,.
“I feel like we finally understand the complete financial structure of the company as we continue to transform our business,” Brennan said.
Moving forward, Transformco plans on using Workday Adaptive Planning to combine both financial and non-financial data so it can uncover new business insights.
“We have about 150 non-financial data points just in our home services division, such as the number of calls we get, how many calls turn into appointments, the cost per call, the duration of calls, and so on. We’ve been collecting data throughout the organization and want to feed it into Workday Adaptive Planning to better understand the financial impact of our operational processes,” Brennan said.
“Ultimately, we want Workday Adaptive Planning to be where we bring all our data together at the top level so that it becomes our golden source of information,” Brennan said.
