eHealth transforms Workday change control and audit efficiency with Kainos Smart Audit
“We went from a two-to-three-week quarterly change prep and review process to a two-day process. That's a significant saving, exactly what we were after.”
About eHealth
eHealth is a health insurance marketplace helping individuals, Medicare beneficiaries, and businesses offering ICHRAs compare their options, enroll with confidence, and get ongoing support. They combine technology, licensed agents, and data-driven tools to simplify complex health insurance decisions for seniors, employees, and employers alike.
eHealth’s Workday journey
eHealth has made significant investments in Workday to support its growing business and compliance requirements. The organisation went live with Workday HCM and Payroll in 2019, followed by Workday Financials in December 2022, Adaptive Planning in 2023 and Strategic Sourcing in 2024.
When Monica Arnold joined eHealth in 2022 as Senior Director for Finance Systems & Payroll Operations, the organisation was preparing for its Workday Financials go-live, bringing immediate focus to audit readiness, change control, and security governance.
The audit and security challenge
As a publicly traded company operating in a highly regulated industry, eHealth is subject to rigorous internal and external audits. “Because of the type of service we provide and being publicly traded, our internal and external audits are very rigorous,” explains Monica.
When Workday Financials went live, the finance systems team needed an audit process immediately, one that auditors could clearly understand, validate, and rely on. “The first question was: what are we going to monitor, and how are we going to monitor it?” says Monica.
Before adopting Kainos Smart Audit, eHealth built a highly detailed, manual audit framework based on the Workday Financial Data Model. The team identified and documented every object that could impact accounting accuracy or external reporting including ledger accounts, spend and revenue categories, expense items, business processes, reports, and integrations.
“Auditors wanted to see how we determined what needed to be monitored. There was a lot of back-and-forth until we reached agreement,” Monica notes. While thorough, this approach was time-consuming. Each quarter, finance and HR teams completed extensive scoping exercises, ran multiple custom Workday reports, validated approvals, tied changes back to tickets, and prepared documentation for auditors, a process that took two to three weeks every quarter, before audit sampling even began.
The Kainos Smart Audit solution
By the time eHealth engaged Kainos, the organisation already had a clear understanding of its audit scope which helped accelerate the Smart Audit implementation. “We were ahead of the game for Kainos because we already knew what we needed to monitor,” says Monica.
With Smart Audit, eHealth fundamentally changed its approach to Workday change control. Instead of quarterly scoping exercises, the team decided to continuously monitor all business processes across both HCM and Financials. “There’s no reason not to. We were spending more time scoping than we would just monitoring,” Monica adds.
Smart Audit now provides unified monitoring across the Workday Financial Data Model, business processes spanning HCM and Financials, key custom reports used for accounting and external reporting, and critical inbound and outbound integrations, including cash and GL postings. During implementation, eHealth conducted a one-month parallel run to validate Smart Audit results against its existing manual reports. “We were able to tie everything out and explain the differences. After that, we felt confident going fully live,” says Monica.
The implementation also highlighted opportunities to strengthen governance, including deprecating risky tenant-to-tenant tools, embedding approvals directly within Workday, and tightening role-based and user-based security controls.
The Benefits: Speed, confidence, and control
Smart Audit delivered immediate impact, enabling eHealth to produce a single quarterly audit report in just one day instead of weeks of manual effort. “Because every ticket is assigned to the case in real time, we didn’t have to do the look-back or go searching,” Monica explains.
Beyond efficiency gains, Smart Audit enabled eHealth to move from reactive to proactive governance. It provides near real-time visibility into unapproved or accidental Workday changes, clearly defined SLAs for investigation and remediation, stronger segregation of duties and approval enforcement, and greater confidence in sharing audit evidence with internal and external auditors. “Now, instead of catching issues at the end of the quarter, we catch them right away,” says Monica.
Today, eHealth has a streamlined, scalable, and auditor-ready approach to Workday change control, strengthening compliance while empowering teams with faster insight and greater confidence. “We know the report is complete. We know it’s accurate. And we’re confident sharing it with our auditors.”