Going through an ERP (enterprise resource planning) transition can be overwhelming and time-consuming, and you may be tempted to put off implementing a reporting solution like Workiva until that transition is complete.
However, we encourage businesses to look at the ERP transformation wholistically, from the first transaction to the end of reporting. With that perspective in mind, there are a few good reasons why you ought to consider making Workiva part of your business transformation initiative.
About 50 percent of our Workiva clients have gone through an ERP transition. In our experience, the costs and level of effort is actually lower for teams using Workiva's Financial Statement Automation than for teams using heavily manual or excel-based processes. We’ve found this to be true even when factoring in any changes that need to be made to existing integrations.
How can that be? When teams are using excel, the workload can be significant because implementing the new data sources, excel add-ins, and ERP reports often mean that the entire collection of excel workbooks needs to be adjusted in some way, and sometimes, even recreated. We've seen this process take several months of the financial reporting team’s time, on top of their existing workload.
With the reporting processes built within Workiva, the impact to the team is often much lower because the entirety of their reporting process is automated using Workiva tools such as source links and Wdata connections.
So when you move your excel reporting to Workiva, the Workiva integration will push all the data to the appropriate channels, reducing dozens hours of work upfront and saving weeks of time during the transition.
Let’s say you get up and running on Workiva while you’re on Workday. A couple months after implementing Workiva, you decide to transition to Oracle. You may think this will cause you a headache and unnecessary work to transition from the two systems, so why not wait until the transition to Oracle is complete before implementing Workiva?
The reality is that for ERP, Workiva is typically connecting to Trial Balance data. When our customers transition from one ERP to another, we're able to work with financial data via the IT teams, to update the integrations to connect to identically structured Trial Balance data - which means the impact to all the downstream reporting within Workiva is close to zero.
Workiva users can easily switch their premium connector from Workday to Oracle, for example. You will not incur additional charges from Workiva to switch your connector.
From a consulting perspective, because many of our clients get involved in some sort of ERP transition, we cater our roadmap assessment and implementation consulting services to ensure these transformations are as least impactful to our clients as possible, from both a level of effort and cost perspective. Taking our client’s business transformation into consideration, we will build a proof of concept within our 3-5 week roadmap exercise so that clients can visualize these concepts within the Workiva platform.
All things considered, there’s no reason to put off Workiva implementation due to a planned or existing ERP transition. The modifications are minimal, the costs are nearly zero, and Workiva will actually end up saving you time on reporting preparation when ready to transition.
If you’re considering Workiva, contact Mike Molloy and find out why we’re named Workiva’s Mid-Market Partner of the Year two years running.
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