Coming Soon: New System for Accessing Employee Information
By Jean Yaeger
Anticipation is building at Cook Children’s for our transition June 30, 2023, to the Workday cloud-based application, a tool that will change how you access personal work information and much more.
Cook Children’s is bringing together all of the components we currently manage in Lawson and several other systems into one universal system with more features and functionality for employees. Workday will impact business processes throughout our organization.
In other words, whatever you do now in Lawson, you’ll be doing on Workday after June 30. This includes benefits and pay, job postings, submitting invoices, and managing your personal data (changing your address, for instance).
Beth Schmidt, Vice President Human Resources, has implemented several Human Resources platforms during her career at Cook Children’s. It’s time to put a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in place because our current way of using Lawson is being discontinued.
“Workday in the ERP world is kind of like Epic in the electronic medical record world,” Beth said. “It’s set up as a full complement of services -- Human Resources, Finance and Supply Chain, which are very interconnected. Workday should give us a significant boost in our reporting capabilities.”
What’s changing for employees? You’ll be able to conveniently reach your personal work information using the Workday tools on any mobile device with an internet connection. With just a few clicks, you can pull up your info and perform tasks in areas such as:
- Compensation and benefits details
- Expenses
- Purchases
- Team directory
- Annual performance review system (PACE) will go live during a future phase
Another area at Cook Children’s that will see a big impact is our Supply Chain, where Workday will be used to track and coordinate inventory, requisitions, purchases and receipt of goods. “So the change will be significant,” said John Kott, Assistant Vice President Supply Chain. “But we will have a methodical approach to training and preparation for go-live.”
We are very excited to say that expense reports will be going electronic! Receipts can be added easily by mobile app or uploading images, and Workday’s optical character recognition will read and populate as much as it can to start your expense report.
Employee and manager training sessions will be offered as the Workday launch gets closer. Watch for those dates and other important updates on the Connect Newsroom.
The switch is a major undertaking for our staff from various departments who have worked collaboratively for more than a year in design, planning, testing, verifying data and integrating the data into the Workday models. They will continue to devise strategies and do extended testing in the coming months.
Thanks to everyone for their efforts with this monumental project, which will have significant impacts at Cook Children’s for years to come.
“We know that this process has been very involved and time consuming,” Beth said, “but this new platform should provide Cook Children’s the format needed to move us into the future.”