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Graduating from a Legacy Platform to Collaborative Planning in the Cloud

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Product Tidemark Company Brown University Name Susan Howitt Job Title Associate Vice President for Budget and Planning ERP/EPM System WorkDay Role Finance Industry Education Services

The Client

  • Private, highly selective research university
  • Founded in 1764 and the seventh-oldest college in the United States
  • $900 million budget
  • 5,000 faculty and staff members, 8,000 students
  • Students come from all 50 states and more than 100 countries

Business Challenges

Detailed Budget and Line Item Planning using a Workday Data Model

From 2011 to 2013, Brown University implemented Workday Human Capital Management and Financials. As part of that change, they completely revamped their financial data model (chart of accounts).

  • The legacy budget planning and development system would not easily integrate with Workday, and they would be faced with a costly and time-consuming project to get the two platforms to work together.
  • Although Brown’s legacy system allowed the finance group to monitor spend and revenue, developing a consolidated plan was arduous. There was no workflow and virtually no control, and no one had a reliable single view of where they stood against the big picture.
“It was older technology and not easily adaptable to the new state of the art data model we implemented. We spent a lot of time overcoming the limitations of our legacy platform, so we could not focus on the metrics that were important to us.”
Roberta Gordon
Former Workday Project Director, Brown University

 

“Why would you stick with technology that’s 10 to 15 years old when you’re moving to the cloud?”
Susan Howitt
Associate Vice President for Budget and Planning, Brown University

Creating a Unified Planning Process

  • With four schools working from separate financial models and data repositories, Brown was struggling to maintain a unified strategic planning process that provided visibility across the entire university.
  • Finance managers worked overtime to make sure each school’s spreadsheets synced with university-wide assumptions and that long-term plans aligned with the University’s overarching strategic plan.
  • Stakeholders didn’t have a way to track the impact of their decisions let alone take strategic action with confidence.
“It was disconnected, and it wasn’t easy to integrate. Each unit used their own format for multi-year planning, so there had to be a highly manual process to generate a comprehensive view.”
Roberta Gordon
Former Workday Project Director, Brown University

Solution

Tidemark

In April 2014, Brown went live with a budget planning process in Tidemark using the Workday data model. More than 120 users throughout the university are using Tidemark apps as part of the new-year budget planning. Financial managers can “slice and dice” the data to see the detailed budgets and high-level summaries to determine if the budget is an accurate reflection of their plans.

“Tidemark’s knowledge of Workday is making this a quicker and easier implementation. They speak the same language. And Tidemark made it their job to understand how to integrate these platforms to meet our needs.”
Roberta Gordon
Former Workday Project Director, Brown University

Business Impact

  • Single view of plans and analytics that can be shared across the university.
  • Seamlessly aggregate data from multiple users into one unified planning process and operating budget, effectively replacing several legacy solutions.
  • Decision makers will be able to collaborate within the same view of data, and all information is presented in the same format, so they will get a full view of the data and the events, collaboration, and conversations taking place around it.
  • Tidemark apps give users a full view of key internal and external factors driving organizational performance.
  • Able to perform more proactive and strategic forecasting process. With the ability to adjust drivers in sync, major operating units of the university can actively participate in the planning process and make better, more strategic decisions.
  • All information is shown in the context of overarching operations; it can be connected to specific driver-based changes to better inform future decisions.

“Our new approach is much more driver-based than before. With Tidemark, you make changes as you go, and with this iterative process, you can easily see the impact of data, roles, and other variables no matter where in the process you are.”

Roberta Gordon
Former Workday Project Director, Brown University

"Tidemark gives us the functionality and flexibility to budget in the Workday data model and see the results at all levels of the organization.”

Susan Howitt Associate Vice President for Budget and Planning

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