Workday Case Study: From Firefighting to Foundation in a Hypergrowth Financial Services Organization

The Situation

A financial services organization that had grown to 2,000 employees in two years was struggling to get consistent, reliable outcomes from Workday. They had aggressive plans for continued growth, but the system and the team supporting it weren't keeping pace.

Every pay, payroll, HR and HRIS were spending countless hours resolving issues that surfaced during payroll processing. The executive team desired 98% data quality in support of future initiatives, including performance evaluations, Adaptive Planning, and acquisitions. But the team was challenged building toward those goals while firefighting daily operations.

Workday had shared ownership between Finance, IT and HR, but team struggled to find the bandwidth to address structural issues, daily operations and enhancements while absorbing acquisition volume. The organization needed embedded expertise to stabilize the system, build internal capability, and create the conditions for the team to succeed at scale. As the CPO put it at the start of the engagement: "we’re not worried about the problems we know about. We’re worried about the ones we don't."

The Underlying Cause

The gaps weren't Workday implementation failures. They reflected an operating model built for a smaller organization now trying to support hypergrowth.

Foundational workforce data—FTE, time type, work location, worker classification—wasn't consistently governed across acquired entities. Workday produced outcomes that required correction rather than prevention. The job profile library had ballooned to 750 profiles across 1,200 employees, creating redundancy that compounded with every acquisition. Payroll inputs, designed for exceptions, had become a primary operating mechanism to bridge upstream configuration gaps.

The organization had an AMS partner handling acquisitions, but leadership wanted deeper strategic support and insights into best practices and downstream impacts for consideration. With limited internal resourcing that possessed Workday expertise and business context to assess downstream impacts while providing detailed ticket information, this muted the impact of their AMS partner. A bridge between strategy and execution was critical to its value.

This pattern creates compounding risk. Configuration gaps accumulate. Manual workarounds become permanent. And the team absorbs increasing volume through effort rather than structure.

The Engagement

We embedded with the organization for six months, working directly alongside HRIS, Payroll, HR, and IT. The engagement began with a focused data quality initiative and expanded as we gained visibility into structural gaps driving recurring issues. The work had two parallel tracks: stabilizing the system while building internal capability to sustain improvements long-term.

Stabilization:

• Data quality foundation: We supported a 30-day data cleanup initiative, reviewing files compiled by the internal team, identifying discrepancies, and processing corrections via EIB. We updated more than 1,200 employee records across more than 2,000 data fields. C-Suite support led this effort’s success—clean data enabled the business to do more with Workday.

• Payroll configuration: We corrected Workday payroll holiday pay calculations for three population subsets that had required manual updates for each holiday, generating nearly $10,000 in annual savings.

• Job profile architecture: We reduced the job profile library by 80%, creating sustainable architecture that wouldn't require a new profile for every hire. This work also supported IT's Adaptive Planning implementation, which depended on clean, consistent employee data.

• Performance management: We configured and launched mid-year performance reviews across multiple companies and delivered a retention dashboard with exit insights to support executive decision-making.

• Absence remediation: We reviewed the absence module against policy, identified 30+ items where the system was misaligned or underperforming, and completed 40% before the engagement ended. The remainder was prioritized and documented for continuation.

Capability building:

• HRIS development: We met weekly with the HRIS team to build deeper internal capacity across key Workday areas. This empowered the internal team to take on deeper configuration work and expand its support of the business.

• Workday Leadership: Midway through the engagement, the organization onboarded dedicated Workday leadership. We provided knowledge transfer and business context across key recent Workday initiatives and upcoming work, concluding with a prioritized remediation approach that provided a foundation for internal conversations about sequencing and resources.

• IT enablement: We coordinated regularly with IT on security, permissions, and integration dependencies. Our presence reduced Workday-related tickets to IT substantially, freeing them to focus on strategic initiatives. At the conclusion of our engagement, IT had onboarded two dedicated Workday support team members to sit alongside HRIS, who also added an additional team member.

Risk Advisory

Near the end of the engagement, leadership wanted to complete a Workday benefits implementation within three months. These payroll costs were managed through payroll inputs, making qualifying life events, hires and terminations difficult to manage. We advised the scope required more internal resources than currently on staff, would demand tradeoffs from other priorities, and needed the kind of structure that had made their data cleanup successful: executive sponsorship, paused competing priorities, communication and engagement plan, and dedicated focus. Without that, a $300,000+ implementation carried meaningful risk.

Internal Workday leadership validated these risks, telling leadership the business wasn't ready. The organization deferred the implementation—a decision that avoided compounding their challenges during an already demanding growth phase and period of heavy change for their employees.

The Results

The engagement stabilized critical processes, built internal capability, and positioned the organization to scale without being dependent on reactive fixes without root cause analysis. The total investment for embedded services was more than offset by the $300,000+ risk avoided and ongoing operational savings through system changes.

Quantifiable Outcomes

• Approximately $30,000 in annual operational savings through reduced issue resolution time, corrected payroll configuration, and streamlined job profile architecture, with additional savings possible with remaining absence fixes

• Job profile library reduced by 80%

• $300,000+ implementation risk avoided

Capability Outcomes

• HRIS specialist promoted to Senior HRIS Specialist within three months of engagement end

• Workday leaders equipped with prioritized roadmap to drive structural improvements and alignment with other organizational priorities

• Improved performance management data to drive retention and employee engagement initiatives

• Foundational data quality improved, enabling reliable downstream reporting and positioning IT's Adaptive Planning implementation for success

"Thank you so much for everything you did for us. We are better as an organization for having worked with you."

"I've learned so much and grown so much. I'm now being included in more meetings than before and getting to do more."

"Your hard work and problem-solving mindset has been the backbone to our extremely novice Workday skillset. You've made every project better and every challenge lighter just by being part of it."

What This Engagement Reflects

Hypergrowth exposes every gap in an operating model. Systems that work at one scale break at another. Teams that are at capacity managing current volume can't simultaneously build for future volume.

This organization needed a partner to help stabilize what was broken, enhance the team's ability to manage the system, and provide the judgment to know when to move forward and when to wait. Key areas were stabilized. Workday leadership had a defined list of focus areas, policy items to clarify, and additional internal capacity and knowledge. An organization scaling aggressively had the internal capability to absorb that growth with a clearer picture of what’s to come.

Abnormal Logic provides Workday consulting services that help organizations bring clarity and stability to complex Workday environments. If you're struggling to get value from your Workday investment and suspect the barriers aren't purely technical, we can help you understand what's really in the way.

Reach out to us at info@abnormallogic.com to start the conversation.