AUTOMATION:

With efficiency very much at the front of business minds, from the board room down, employees are speculating on how the deployment of modern SaaS software will affect them and their business. It’s a conversation racked with questions: what system is best for our business? Is it easy to integrate? Can we afford to deploy it? Can we afford not to deploy it? The reality is that modern SaaS software is proving its worth, delivering the growing levels of automation progressive businesses need. And one company that has actively embraced the opportunities this offers is Coventry Building Society.

As the UK’s second largest building society, twenty years of rapid growth and an outdated legacy system full of manual processes led Coventry Building Society to radically transform its finance systems. At its core was the need for greater standardisation and automation to drive organisational performance. “People had to work really hard just to get the basics right,” recalls Andrea Harrison, Head of Finance Transformation at Coventry Building Society. “That left very limited time for people to actually look forward, analyse, and add value.” A SaaS approach was agreed upon and the selected supplier was to be Workday.

“We were very impressed,” says Harrison, talking of the proposed solution. The HR team had already adopted Workday’s Human Capital Management, and its success and familiarity provided a solid basis for the finance transition. Even so, change can be challenging and so an extensive comms campaign kept people informed, created a receptive environment, and allayed the inevitable cynicism. “We really banged the drum and were very clear about the outcomes we were aiming for,” Harrison explains. “Such as the three-day close and getting 80% of our reporting standardised and self-service.”

Being a regulated organisation there were concerns about implementing a SaaS solution, and a lot of work went into convincing and assuring the board and regulators. So, when the system quickly started delivering results, it was a great relief. “It’s like night and day,” Harrison says, talking of their increased ability to analyse costs. Whereas they had previously relied on copying rows into Excel, they could now access information at the touch of a button and then drill down to interrogate it more deeply.

Similarly, they now had greatly enhanced visibility at a transactional level through the ability to interface with core banking systems to quickly and easily see what was happening. Fundamental to achieving their goals was the shift to increased automation in month-end processes – from barely 5% to more than 70% being automated or semi-automated. “This is a huge, huge improvement,” enthuses Harrison. “We are now capable of a three-day month end.”

The experience of the Payroll team reflects the benefits gained throughout the business. From being able to see the full payroll data in advance and therefore proactively identify and resolve issues, to enabling employees to take more control through self-service functions, the solution brought the team standardisation and time. With everyone across the world using the same system, “the updates are always there, meaning you never get left behind,” explains Andy Smart, Payroll Officer at Coventry Building Society. “It gives us that extra time to make sure we are doing things properly.”

Throughout finance, the transformation has been significant. Coventry Building Society now benefits from massively improved reporting flexibility; the brand-new ability to slice and dice data; a greatly enhanced capacity for analysing costs; and a 16-fold increase in standardised and self-reporting. “It was great to hear that we were not only 100% right to go with SaaS – we were 100% right to go with Workday,” says Harrison. “The user experience is really positive.”

This is reflected in the cultural shift that Coventry Building Society, and the wider business world, is experiencing as technology frees talent from the mundane and gives them the time to do more. This is doing more than driving business efficiencies: it is enabling the C-Suite to employ their teams more dynamically, creating a more agile, forward-facing, and proactive workforce. “People’s roles have changed from being administrative and extracting data, to really starting to add value,” reflects Harrison. “And that’s a really interesting journey to go on.”