Basic Financial Management system

May 14, 2014 by Mark Stinson on Financial Management

Late last year, Shelter Insurance Companies selected Workday to move our finance operations off legacy technology and into the cloud. We are nearly halfway through and expect to have Workday Financial Management fully deployed in September. Workday invited me to contribute to the Workday Blog, and I've taken them up on the opportunity to share our experience with others.

I serve as director of corporate accounting at Shelter. In this first blog post, I'll cover two things that have really stood out for us at Shelter: the speed of the deployment so far, and how Workday has partnered with us to map accounts, data conversion, and system integrations. In my post tomorrow, I'll talk about Worktags and how we plan to use them to meet our business transparency goals.

Part 1 of diary of a Workday Financial Management deployment.

Shelter is based in Columbia, Mo., and provides home, life, auto, and business insurance to customers in 17 states. Our goal with Workday is to have one system of record for financial data and create more transparency across business lines and divisions. Workday is in the cloud, but when we started the selection process to replace our aging accounting systems we didn't focus on whether the solution should be cloud-based or on our premises. We just wanted the best we could find for our company.

So how's the deployment going so far? It's been pretty awesome. Moving to a new financial system takes time and effort, and there's still a lot of work that needs to be done, but we at Shelter have been pleased with how it's progressing. Workday has been a great partner. In addition to being really helpful, I've liked working with every person I've come in contact with at Workday. These positive interactions speak to the company's culture.

Speed of Deployment

In March, just 10 weeks after we started deploying Workday, we were already testing transactions and had converted in a full year of historical data. I never imagined we'd be that far along so early in the deployment phase. Part of our decision to select Workday was driven by the perceived ease of implementation when compared to on-premise solutions, so already the value of a cloud-based solution is saving us time and money.