Cost-constrained, risk-consumed, and talent-crunched, many businesses are rethinking what comes next after undergoing a Workday-enabled transformation. When the pace of change was less dynamic, they would often turn to their internal support teams to maintain their new cloud applications. Or, if their internal capacity was insufficient, they would look to a third-party provider to augment their staff in a cost-effective way, engaging them to perform routine tasks such as addressing user queries and managing tickets. But these options don't always address today's reality in which technology, talent, and risk forces are colliding. Few support teams have the capacity to uptake releases on a regular cadence.  And the traditional cost-focused application managed services (AMS) model doesn’t bring the industry experience and business process knowledge necessary to embed continuous innovation and agility into the constant evolution of human capital, supply chain, financial management, risk and tax functions. This gap between cost-control and value-creation has given rise to next-generation Operate services for Workday.

Shifting toward value
 

Multiple forces are converging to move the market toward Operate services, a new type of value-focused managed services. As outlined in a recent article by Harvard Business Review Analytics, these forces include the urgency of digital transformation, the difficulty of bridging talent gaps, and the importance of complying with increasingly rigorous regulations in areas such as tax, legal, and cybersecurity. These dynamics are likely to intensify with the rapid ascent of AI, including Generative AI, and the need for greater automation.

Many companies are finding themselves caught in the crosshairs of this convergence. They may have successfully gone live with Workday only to discover that they underestimated the staffing and skills needed to make the most of its semiannual releases. Others may be surprised to find that maintaining their legacy system versus their new cloud platform requires different skills. While their support team may be comfortable maintaining an on-premise application, about customization and development, it may be ill-equipped to optimize a cloud application, which is about configuration and release uptake. And, still others may find it challenging to keep pace with industry trends in financial management and HR, which may require intelligent automation, deeper insights, or new types of reporting.

A new dynamic approach to managed services is needed to navigate this complex landscape. Operate services fulfill this need by taking traditional AMS to the next level. Building upon a foundation of essential maintenance services, Deloitte's Workday Operate services focus on achieving value-based business outcomes that help enable organizations to run more efficiently and with greater agility. While the shift from relatively static maintenance engagements to new business-oriented dynamic partnerships is occurring across technology platforms, Deloitte’s robust Workday Operate services open up a host of new opportunities for organizations seeking to optimize their Workday investments.

Embedding continuous advantage

Deloitte’s Workday Operate services help embed continuous advantage into client operations by combining hard-to-source domain and industry talent, technology, and transformation know-how. The emphasis is on delivering business outcomes while providing the creative spark for helping to enable organizations to innovate continuously, accelerate growth, and manage risk with confidence. Deloitte’s Workday Operate services have five key outcomes:

While emphasizing next-generation AMS, Deloitte’s Workday Operate services still cover the full spectrum of outsourced maintenance. Through a comprehensive service-delivery model, Deloitte Workday Operate teams can help in-house IT staff to manage tickets and service level agreements (SLAs) more effectively. In addition to fixing defects, Deloitte Workday Operate teams bring leading practices for enhancing process efficiencies, improving productivity, decreasing incidents, lowering work volumes, and reducing costs. Wherever organizations are on their journeys, Deloitte can meet them there, helping them to move beyond traditional outsourcing models into a world focused on outcomes, where they can operate with agility and control.
 

Value enablement leveraging tools and assets
 

Deloitte’s tools and accelerators enhance the quality and speed of delivery. Using real-time insights, tenant analysis, and optimization recommendations, these tools optimize your investment in EERP by Workday now and in the future

Understanding the Deloitte Difference
 

Value-enhancing Workday Operate opportunities come in many forms. Maybe it involves applying bots to accelerate the financial close process. Or, perhaps it is about analyzing HCM processes to identify what needs to change to improve user adoption. Or, it could entail saving money by fully leveraging Workday Supply Chain Management Software (SCM) for Healthcare to automate source-to-pay and implement mobile inventory processes. Regardless of where an optimization opportunity may lie, Deloitte has the depth of Workday experience and industry know-how to help organizations go beyond the fundamentals to embrace a new “operate” mindset. Deloitte’s Workday Operate model has several distinct features for helping organizations turn managed services into an engine for value realization:

• Proactive versus reactive.  Deloitte Workday Operate teams seek to get ahead of concerns before they arise and bring ideas to the business and IT team. Taking a proactive approach is key to progressively reducing defects and incidents. 
• Industry specialization. Deloitte’s industry specialties span healthcare, higher education, government, consumer products, financial services, risk/tax, and more. Thus, Deloitte Workday Operate teams are well-equipped to identify opportunities to improve the user experience and achieve efficiencies across the business as well as within IT.
• Data-rich analytics and Insights. From dashboards to predictive planning, Deloitte has developed a suite of capabilities that can deliver outcome-oriented intelligence to drive smarter, faster decisions.
• Trends perspective. Through scale and collaborative ecosystem relationships, Deloitte can see what potentially lies ahead in markets and suggest vendor product road maps. .
• Continuous innovation. Deloitte helps organizations stay on the leading edge via an end-to-end, integrated delivery model and proprietary tools and accelerators.
• Strategic advisor. Drawing upon its industry experience and multi-disciplinary capabilities across finance, HR, supply chain, tax, risk, and more, Deloitte delivers keen insights and actionable advice to unlock business value.

While application stability and reliability remain important, many support/sustainment organizations may be under pressure to do more. Deloitte’s “Operate” services are designed to do that, with differentiators that provide a bridge from transactional sustainment to collaborative enhancement.

Optimization reigns supreme
 

Deloitte Workday Operate services can help companies realize the next level of value from their Workday-enabled investments regardless of where they presently are in their transformation journeys. In the end, finding the right collaborator post go-live can mean the difference between continually gaining advantage and steadily falling behind. In the new world of outcome-focused “Operate” services, cost is no longer the main factor in making a selection. It is a matter of who has the expertise, skills, commitment, and propriety tools to help the organization get the most out of its Workday platform from day-one onward.