Life Time improve control, visibility and reporting with Smart Audit automation for Workday
Project Requirements
- Reduce time-consuming manual auditing effort
- Become proactive rather than reactive to reduce risk
- Increase visibility and understanding of risks across entire Workday environment
Project Results
- Reduction of manual Workday auditing by 70%
- Pre-built out-of-the-box checks live in 24 hours
- Improved visibility and reporting across every tenant
About Life Time
Headquartered in Minnesota, Life Time is the ‘Healthy Way of Life Company’ striving to help organisations, communities, and individuals achieve their total health aspirations. In recent years, the organisation has grown significantly and now has more than 150 destinations in 41 major markets across the US and Canada. Today, Life Time has two million members who are supported by 30,000 dedicated employees.
Pioneering Workday technology to fuel strategic growth
With people, talent development and operational excellence at the forefront of their growth strategy, Life Time became one of the first organisations in the world (customer #12) to sign with Workday. Since then, the organisation has continued to pioneer new ways of using the platform to achieve their objectives, forming a partnership with Kainos in 2019 to automate Workday testing, and more recently, Workday auditing and compliance.
Life Time’s Senior Director of Technology explains, “Our primary business strategy is to accelerate growth across our supply chain, by focusing on four key objectives. Firstly, by delivering operational excellence through continued productivity improvements, then reducing costs through those operational efficiencies. Thirdly our focus is on finding the most diverse workforce by attracting and developing the best talent. And lastly of course, deploying the best technology to support all of this.”
“A large part of our Workday success relates to our great partnership with Kainos. As I said already, reducing costs and streamlining operations is key to our growth—two things that have largely been made possible from leveraging automation, namely testing and auditing Workday,” he adds.
Knowledge gaps and lean teams create auditing burden
With a finite number of resources who are relied upon on for all Workday operations and governance, the team were stretched when asked to assist with the audit process. Internal and External Auditors were heavily dependent on this team of Workday experts to maintain and report on crucial controls.
“My team are responsible for supporting the business’s requirement to perform both quarterly internal audits and external audits. Outside of my team, technical understanding of Workday is limited, especially amongst the Internal Audit, Finance, HRIS, and Security functional teams. Because we know what makes Workday tick, we are tasked with not only ensuring that key controls like Segregation of Duties are in place but that the evidence to audit these controls is collected, distributed, and in many cases explained in detail to other stakeholders across the business. This obviously absorbs a lot of my team's time.”
Full compliance visibility proves challenging
Beyond the effort of gathering, evidencing, and bringing other functional areas of the business up to speed on their controls come audit time, the Workday team needed to ensure their entire Workday environment remained compliant at all times.
“We have to comply across all of our Workday functional areas– Compensation, Payroll, Personal Data and Financial aspects related to Accounting; however, the breadth of our oversight was limited to the time and expertise we had on hand to manage these controls—a combination of circumstances that poses its own risks. For example, ensuring data is appropriately secured to conform to data protection legislations like the CCPA or incoming NYPA, as well as our own high standards of corporate governance can be challenging when you’re looking for the needles in the haystack and resources are stretched.”
“What’s more, if financial controls aren’t secured, the consequences are serious—fraud, theft, reputational damage are all very real threats. Although Life Time aren’t subject to SOX, we’re a company that prides itself on best-practice and we answer to our investors—despite the challenges we may face, our underlying principle is to have robust controls to mitigate the risk of malicious actions and ensure accurate financial reporting. Previously, achieving the high benchmark we have set ourselves in this area has been a struggle at times.”
The immediate impact of Smart Audit for Life Time
As an organisation with a strategic awareness of how technology could support its workforce and growth ambitions, Life Time was a perfect candidate to put Smart Audit into action in 2021. The challenges the team had around auditing, Segregation of Duties checks, evidence gathering, and visibility of risk would soon be alleviated due to Smart Audit’s out-of-the-box, automated preventative and detective checks—but the effort and time saved has been the team’s most remarkable win.
“We couldn’t believe that Smart Audit was up and running in less than 24 hours across all of our Workday tenants—it really has provided us with instant value. We’re performing months’ worth of work in around 15 minutes. We can now extend our reach in terms of the audits we perform, we are not restricted, and this has reduced the hours of manual effort we typically spent by around 70%. By giving time back to our team, we can focus on more strategic objectives and can continue to help our colleagues across the business.”
“My team, who would normally manually evaluate all security groups and key business processes to identify access to sensitive information, now have a tool that totally automates this process. Being able to get ahead of the risk of any potential inappropriate access or fraudulent activities in an on-going way has been transformative. We couldn’t do this anywhere near the extent that we wanted to and now if an issue pops up, we can check this out and work on a solution instantly.”
Proactive auditing & reporting alleviates the stress of unforeseen risk
The Workday team at Life Time have made marked improvements in what they can achieve during and outside of audits. Now proactively identifying and mitigating risk across Life Time’s entire Workday environment without relying on the expertise of whomever is available, the wider business is beginning to reap the benefits of Smart Audit.
“We now have total confidence in our Workday environment, it’s not just focused on someone’s ability on the day to interpret risk or react to it when an issue occurs. We’re analysing risk and managing compliance daily in a way that’s completely automated, so we’re not scrambling each quarter when it’s time for an audit. Now, anybody on the Workday team can go directly into Smart Audit, look at the dashboards and have the right information available that’s easy to digest.”
“That’s been another win for us—how we can now quickly and easily present this information to the business. With Excel spreadsheets, you can only do so much but now, with Smart Audit it’s making it much easier for folks to understand what's going on, what they should be reviewing and where they should be spending time. This element of transparency across all of our tenants, and the fact that it’s quick and easy for anyone in the team to use has been a huge benefit of Smart Audit. Thanks to our partnership with Kainos and this powerful tool, we fully expect to breeze through our next audit.”