Workday at Ohio State: from Planning to Production

The closing of fiscal year 2021 is the first annual close using transactional data from Workday! If you are a faculty or staff member who has been at Ohio State anytime between 2016 and early 2021, you undoubtedly heard something about Workday and the Enterprise Project.

Although originally planned as a smaller effort to replace Ohio State’s finance system, the Enterprise Project evolved into a multi-year complete business transformation. Upon seeing how Workday could be leveraged to make the transformation, university leadership developed a new overarching project goal of improving the Ohio State experience and advancing operational excellence through the implementation of Workday and other technologies.

The scope of the Enterprise Project grew to include optimizing not just finance, but also HR, payroll, supply chain management, student services and IT business processes. And while the Enterprise Project included more than just technology changes, replacing our former PeopleSoft core administrative systems with cloud-based Workday was a huge piece of the project’s foundation. The change to a single Workday system provides Ohio State with one primary source of trusted data (a single source of truth) that can be shared by all of Ohio State and the Wexner Medical Center for improved decision-making.

A system go-live might not seem like something to celebrate six months later, considering our user community is still adjusting to the changes. However, we should keep in mind that we implemented an entire enterprise system, during a pandemic, at a size and level of complexity not undertaken before at Ohio State!

Kudos to all project team members, business stakeholders, and most importantly our end users in the Ohio State community for helping us reach go-live. We should all take a moment to pause and reflect on the impressive work that went into Workday Release 1 as highlighted in the following list of fast facts. Be sure to stay tuned for forthcoming news about Workday Student!

• 50 Enterprise Tableau Datasets Created
• 59 Process Blockers Resolved
• 90 Enterprise Tableau Dashboards Created
• 108 Change Coordinators Engaged for Go-Live Activities
• 150 Systems Retired for Workday Release 1
• 162 Non-project Employee Volunteers Facilitated Training
• 250 Dashboards connected to Enterprise Tableau Datasets
• 358 System Integrations Built
• 485 Job Aids and Training Courses Created
• 884 Leadership Key Decisions Made
• 9,726 Processes Tested and Validated
• 6.5 million Data Conversions Made