In the continuously changing world of healthcare, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and reorganizations are commonplace. Despite their frequency, however, they’re still a daunting task to navigate for healthcare leaders, especially during our current age of uncertainty. One tool many healthcare systems have turned to that’s helped alleviate some of these worries is Workday.

Designed to provide agility as well as business insights to support change, Workday is particularly useful to hospitals. In fact, one of our senior-level Workday consultants is currently helping a hospital system with Workday as they work through a merger and acquisition. 

Read on to learn more about some of the challenges they’re facing, as well as how our consultant is helping them navigate the twists and turns of an M&A in the healthcare space. (Or, check out our recent article for a Checklist for Healthcare M&A Success with Workday.)

Project Overview and Key Challenges

Our client, a healthcare system in the US, has acquired three hospitals and is combining them into their Workday system. Instead of trying to manage this project with merely internal resources, the hospital turned to Surety Systems and our Workday consultant. 

Our expert has been consulting on Workday projects for over five years and has helped dozens of clients, including other hospital systems going through M&A and reorganizations. That translates to plenty of hands-on experience in overcoming the common challenges healthcare orgs face when merging IT systems, challenges like…

Data

The first challenge our consultant faced with this client was with their data. The new hospital systems all worked with outdated, legacy systems, making it difficult to convert that data straight into Workday. Knowing this would be an issue, our consultant set up a series of working sessions with the team to identify all the data and the fields they would need to convert the information into Workday. 

Benefits

Next, our Workday consultant tackled benefit decisions. When moving to a new system, decisions need to be made about the new rules and regulations around benefits for the onboarding employees. For example, one of the new healthcare systems might have different rules about absences or vacation time, and you’ll need to decide if those employees will stay on their current plans or be migrated to the new company rules immediately. 

The good news is that Workday is flexible enough to allow you to build rules from an eligibility standpoint and maintain that piece until you’re ready to implement a global rollout for new employees. The bad news is that there can be challenges when it comes to organizing and building these policies in Workday—but they’re nothing an experienced consultant can’t handle.

Learning a New System

Employees and system users can become very attached to software, especially when it’s tied to their role or customized around what they do. Knowing that there’d be a learning curve with the new software, our consultant spent a lot of time helping users understand how to get the most value out of Workday. While more user-friendly than many legacy systems, good training involves demonstrating what Workday can do, (as well as the cool tips and tricks only an expert can teach you). 

The Benefits of a Workday Consultant 

A merger and acquisition is not something you can easily do without surrounding yourself with the right team. As with navigating through any change, making the transition as seamless as possible requires the strongest talent possible. That’s where an expert 3rd-party Workday consultant enters the picture. 

Consultants provide the knowledge, flexibility, and experience to help you prepare for (and overcome) any challenges you may face during what can be a complicated process. They know the industry, the technology, and exactly what you can and can’t do with Workday, especially when it comes to configurations. Having worked with different organizations and different systems, an experienced consultant can take all that first-hand knowledge they gained from previous projects and bring it to yours, helping you avoid costly mistakes. 

Getting Started with a Workday Consultant 

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased M&A activity in the healthcare industry, and each system comes with its own set of challenges. Careful planning, evaluation, and execution are necessary to ensure a successful M&A. 

Knowing when to take the reins and when to ask for guidance will be key. Because at the end of the day, a plan is only as good as the people who execute it—and having an experienced expert at your side makes handling a complicated situation much less difficult. 

Contact us today to put our senior-level Workday consulting team to work for you.