By Steve Dunne, EMEA Staff Writer
The partnership between IT and the CFO function is critical to supporting real financial transformation. At Workday Elevate London, Nigel Bryan, Head of Financial Control at NFU Mutual, spoke with Carolyn Horne, President, EMEA, Workday. He gave a finance leader’s perspective on digital transformation and offered advice to businesses on a similar path to change.
Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about NFU Mutual and what the business does?
I’m Nigel Bryan, Head of Financial Control at NFU Mutual. A lot of people may know of NFU Mutual. We are the National Farmers Union Mutual, an insurance company that’s very much linked to the farming and the rural community and we’ve been in existence for over 100 years. I’m currently leading our transformation and modernisation programme within finance. That’s where Workday comes in – because that’s the system part of the programme. It’s very exciting for me – we go live with our first phase (procurement) at the end of June.
You mentioned NFU is over 100 years old, an organisation with a tremendous heritage. Yet transformation and digitisation are really big areas of focus for you. At what point did that light-bulb moment happen, where you realised you needed to transform your finance function?
I guess it was probably the change of finance leadership in many ways. I came into my role at the same time as my boss. As an organisation, we’d made a lot of investments into customer-facing IT systems. We came in and had a look and said, “well, it’s time for finance now.” We did a piece of work looking at our system landscape and strategically what the finance function needed to look like over the next five to 10 years. This highlighted a number of things, including system risks. As many people will recognise, we had a lot of manual processes with human dependencies, out-of-support systems, end-of-life systems, heavy dependency on EUCs and spreadsheets, very manual control environments – things that aren’t sustainable with the ever-increasing demands being made on the finance function.
This is a journey. It's a cliché but it's true. We're going to be in a continuous development cycle and that's the challenge for us. We are setting up a finance technology and change team because it needs to be something that we need to embed as the ‘way we do things in finance’.
All of which were barriers to that broader strategic vision of finance you were looking to build?
Yes. Ultimately it’s about delivering that strategic vision element in terms of ‘what does finance need to be delivering to the business?’ Tim Wakeford [in an earlier Workday Elevate London session] was talking about finance being business partners as well as value partners. We spend so much time doing the transactional and not enough time supporting the business. So, for us, it wasn’t so much a light-bulb moment, it was a ‘duh’ moment. We just needed to get it done. We then built a business case around many of those points, got the support and off we went.
I know you led the procurement process during the pandemic, so can you tell us about the evaluation stage and some of the key differentiators that really stood out to you?
Yes, we did the RFP online during the pandemic – and I’m pretty sure my kids joined in the process, as many did! It was quite tough doing an RFP remotely like that. But we got through and we selected Workday. I guess two things I was going to mention about what differentiated Workday from other offerings. First of all, obviously, Workday is a true cloud-based offering. And when we looked at some of the other offerings, that really appealed to my IT colleagues from an architecture perspective, the excitement that this brings to the business with the future releases and the evolving picture going forward.
Secondly it was the integrated nature of the product that appealed. One of the challenges we had was that our procurement colleagues were very keen to look at best-of-breed procurement solutions.
There was a bit of tension there in terms of what they would aspire to have versus what we got from some of the ERP-type offerings. But we worked through that and I think it was a key part of the debate. I have to say, ultimately, the benefits you get from an integrated solution like Workday with all the components working together and the additional components you can include from both the data and an HR perspective, was what won the day for us, along with it being a true cloud offering. That was what swayed it and took us down the Workday route.
As many people will recognise, we had a lot of manual processes with human dependencies, out-of-support systems, end-of-life systems, heavy dependency on EUCs and spreadsheets, very manual control environments – things that aren’t sustainable with the ever-increasing demands being made on the finance function.
I know you’ve deployed Workday technologies to support analytics, planning and how you think about accounting. How do you envisage that those will help you collaborate across the business and make better decisions?
We’ve selected Workday Financial Management, Workday Prism Analytics and Workday Accounting Centre. We also selected Workday Adaptive Planning, although we’ll fully implement that in a slightly later phase. But I think one of the things that we were keen to do was to make sure that the programme was really and truly transformational. And by taking Workday Prism Analytics and Workday Accounting Centre, that’s forced us to really think about integration points. You all have your own integration points that you need to think about – but we were keen to make sure we didn’t just lift and shift our current world and just plug it into a new general ledger system.
That would be great and that would de-risk us to a degree, but that’s not transformation in my mind. We’ve gone back to our source systems, pulled new datasets through at a much more granular level and will be building a new data store for us in Workday Financial Management and in Workday Adaptive Planning too. We’ve uncovered some horrors on the way, as I’m sure a lot of organisations have, where you’ve got accounting logic and all sorts of things buried in IT code, in our case, from the 1970s and beyond. We’re looking to address all these.
What’s really exciting for me is what this means going forward, not just from the operational efficiency perspective e.g. more streamlined processes and a single source of truth, but also what we can then do with the more granular data. That will be transformational as well.
One of the things that we were keen to do was to make sure that the programme was really and truly transformational.
Finally, we don’t know what the future holds but when you think about innovation and moving forward, what comes to mind and how do you see technology supporting you through that?
For us in finance at NFU Mutual, implementing the components of Workday that we’ve spoken about are big game-changers. It would be taking those and exploiting them, if that’s the right term, to the maximum. And I think that’s both exciting and scary at the same time. So obviously, going live shortly on Workday, we’ll be taking our first step on the ladder, as it were. It’s a big step and it’s only the first one, as future releases come along with more functionality.
This is a journey. It’s a cliché but it’s true. We’re going to be in a continuous development cycle and that’s the challenge for us. We are setting up a finance technology and change team because it needs to be something that we need to embed as the ‘way we do things in finance’. This is a change from how we thought and behaved before. We now need to focus on delivering continuous improvement and change within the function. That will be our priority focus and keep us busy for a while.
Workday is a true cloud-based offering. And when we looked at some of the other offerings, that really appealed to my IT colleagues from an architecture perspective, the excitement that this brings to the business with the future releases and the evolving picture going forward.
