TRIUMF: Accelerating Finance Insights
As Canada’s particle accelerator center, TRIUMF struggled to track and manage the finances for its many projects using spreadsheets. Thanks to Kainos and Workday Adaptive Planning, TRIUMF now has a single source of truth to dramatically simplify forecasting, budgeting, and reporting.
Who is TRIUMF?
Established in 1968 in Vancouver, TRIUMF is Canada’s particle accelerator center. In collaboration with nearly two dozen Canadian universities, TRIUMF's diverse community of multidisciplinary researchers, engineers, technicians, tradespeople, staff, and students create a unique incubator for Canadian excellence, as well as a portal to premier global collaborations.
TRIUMF acts as Canada’s central hub for discovery, connecting leading Canadian universities and government programs together to solve some of science’s most difficult challenges.
Limited by the speed of spreadsheets
Because their funding comes from multiple partnering organizations, TRIUMF struggled with a complex budgeting and forecasting process that was unwieldy for the finance team and business users alike.
“We get a lot of our funding from different government agencies and universities, each requiring a different level of tracking,” explained Dorothy Paukste, Workday Project Manager at TRIUMF.
Before Workday Adaptive Planning, TRIUMF struggled with an inefficient spreadsheet-driven process that required Excel sheets to be emailed back and forth, hampering their ability to quickly and accurately collaborate during budgeting.
“We have 130 program or project managers for the NRC funding alone, so you can imagine how many emails and phone calls would go back and forth before something could be approved. We would also have people working on the wrong versions of the spreadsheet, which would cause major delays,” Paukste said
Gaining unparalleled insight with Workday Adaptive Planning
TRIUMF went live with Workday in 2021, and knew it wanted to implement Workday Adaptive Planning the following year.
With Workday Adaptive Planning, TRIUMF would be able to create a single source of truth the organization could use for tracking and reporting budgets at the Fund, Cost Center, Program, Project, and Grant levels.
This would allow the organization to gain the transparency and flexibility required to meet the unique requirements of each grant agency without the hassle or errors of manual spreadsheets.
“It represented a huge time savings for our cost center managers,” Paukste said.
Implementing faster with Kainos
Determined to implement Workday Adaptive Planning in time for their next budget season, TRIUMF knew its choice for an implementation partner would be critical.
“We chose Kainos for three reasons,” Paukste said. “First, they are a boutique Workday consulting firm with a whole team of people who do nothing but Workday Adaptive Planning implementations. We liked that compared to the large firms who do a little bit of everything.”
“Second, they have a proven methodology that was flexible to our unique operations. This allowed us to spend more time upfront on requirements, which resulted in almost no surprises when it was time for deployment.”
“Finally, Kainos is focused on knowledge transfer so we could be independent. They wanted us to learn how to support our own environment, instead of being dependent on them for years and years after go-live for support.”
Undertaking a rapid deployment
In order to meet its goal of going live with Workday Adaptive Planning in time to kick off their budget process, TRIUMF needed to meet a rapid 16-week timeline. “The Kainos team pulled out all the stops, because they knew how important it was,” Paukste said.
Thanks to Kainos’ flexible implementation methodology, TRIUMF was able to spend extra time on the front end defining requirements in precise detail while engaging key finance stakeholders in the discovery and requirement gathering process.
“Kainos’ consultants were extremely knowledgeable and responsive to questions. Their experience implementing Workday Adaptive Planning for other clients allowed us to approach a requirement and ask, ‘How did others approach this challenge?’ and they always had a good answer,” Paukste said.
With Kainos in charge of deployment, Paukste had time to focus on rolling out a robust change management campaign featuring nine Q&A sessions, short training videos, and an ambassador network. “The campaign was instrumental in making people aware of Workday Adaptive Planning and getting buy-in.”
Engaging users while saving time
Thanks to close collaboration between Kainos and TRIUMF, the organization went live on time and on budget in time to kick off their annual budgeting cycle. With Workday Adaptive Planning, TRIUMF now has a collaborative platform that its hundreds of users can use for budgeting, planning, and reporting.
Project managers can now compare at a glance their budget versus actuals, allowing them to better forecast their project budgets and adapt as needed. In turn, the finance team now has a better understanding of TRIUMF's true financial picture at any moment.
“With Workday Adaptive Planning, we no longer email spreadsheets back and forth. Just for forecasting, this has saved us roughly two business days of collecting data,” Paukste said.
Finance now uses OfficeConnect to meet the stringent reporting needs of the National Research Council, which oversees operating funding.
“It used to take us 2-3 hours to prepare a report. Now it takes 30 minutes,” Paukste said
What's Next?
TRIUMF can now focus on leveraging all the finance data at its disposal to make smarter decisions about where to focus its research.
“We plan to further improve our resource forecasting over the coming year,” Paukste said. “This will allow us to better communicate with our grant partners to ensure projects are properly funded.”