Bill Gosling Outsourcing leverages the Workday platform for analytics and insights that support its growth ambitions while planning ways to capitalize on AI that’s contextualized to core business processes.
These and other benefits were detailed by Joe Fanutti, chief integration officer for the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firm; Fanutti spoke with Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans at the recent Workday Rising customer conference in Las Vegas.
Bill Gosling’s services include CX and contact center management, accounts receivable management, collections, and workforce management.
Reaching New Heights
Fanutti’s current role at Bill Gosling, which has been in business since 1955, entails integrating people, processes, and technologies. Before being named chief integration officer, he was CFO, which provided solid grounding in the company’s finances, human resources, operations, and the systems that support the various disciplines.
With this holistic perspective, Fanutti is well-positioned to explain how Workday has helped his company achieve ambitions that weren’t possible before introducing the platform more than a decade ago.
“If you look back, the genesis of Workday was really our growth path,” he says. “We wanted organic and inorganic growth, to bring it all together. How do you do that? You need a scalable platform, and you also need insights and analytics.”
The company’s success hinges on hiring the right people, putting them in the right call center programs, and managing them effectively. Workday helps it manage these objectives alongside a challenging business reality: Its workforce churn is 100% every year.
“Bringing Workday in as a full platform allowed us to bring all of the data together and empower operational managers in both the finance and HR side,” Fanutti says.
While empowering leaders was core to the original vision for its Workday implementation, the role of Workday at Bill Gosling has evolved along with the business.
In terms of organic growth, the company has been expanding into new countries — it currently operates in seven. Implementing a system as adaptable as Workday has enabled it to enter new countries without having to navigate overly complex system issues, focusing instead on legal and other challenges unique to a given location.
When Bill Gosling makes acquisitions, Workday is a critical tool in enabling the company to integrate new processes and stakeholders flexibly and quickly, he adds.
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Automation Improves Efficiency
Bill Gosling is a proficient user of Workday automations to efficiently manage unique aspects of its business. For instance, the Workday system performs automated resume ingestion, which is crucial in light of its extraordinary churn rate. “We churn through probably more than 120,000 resumes [per year]…so you’ve got to rely on automation to keep the wheel going,” Fanutti says. The company employs nearly 6,000 people.
Other automations figure prominently in the collections portion of its business. For instance, bank reconciliation is a critical business driver that requires constant attention because each state has its own regulations.
“Before, we had a team of people and all they did was bank recs. Now, you put the automation in there that does all the bank recs for you. What does that let you do? It allows you to take your finance team and say ‘Hey, we don’t need people doing bank recs anymore, we need people doing FP&A [financial planning and analysis], driving business value, and making a step change in the business with the leaders’.”
Workday also supports supplier automation. This has enabled the company to support significant business growth while maintaining its payables team size at a consistent level for a decade.
Forever Forward with AI
Amid the explosion of AI technologies, Workday has adopted the motto “Forever Forward” to describe how it will use AI to “supercharge” HR, finance, and IT functions. Fanutti sees major opportunities for his company with Workday’s AI push.
“I love the strategy,” says Fanutti. “Not just throwing AI out there but making sure AI has got context and it delivers value in the situations where you need it to deliver value.”
The AI-enabled Workday Assistant is particularly useful for employees who are using the Workday platform, he says. “But, if I look at things like budgeting and forecasting, now I can enable AI, I can give a financial plan template to a business leader and say, ‘Go build out your budget.’ You actually don’t need the finance team to build it for you; you can actually build it on your own with AI.”
Workday’s AI creates context. Employees can ask it to relay information that makes sense and is tailored to the business. “That’s an additional layer of context that you can’t have with a general AI tool,” Fanutti says.
Context and deep integration of AI into core business processes are two ways the Workday platform continues to evolve to help Bill Gosling Outsourcing thrive and grow.
