Over its hundred-year existence, Plante Moran has grown from a sole accounting practitioner into a billion-dollar audit, tax, consulting and wealth management firm with close to 4,000 staff members. Paul Blowers, Plante Moran’s chief information officer, credits the firm’s growth to its long-standing commitment to innovation. But with the incredible growth the firm’s enjoyed, he says, came the incremental addition of myriad internal systems. Blowers explains how Plante Moran transformed its operations with Workday, streamlining its finance, human resources and professional solutions automation systems and enabling the firm to better serve its staff and clients.
How has Plante Moran’s partnership with Workday improved overall efficiencies?
Blowers: There’s a massive reduction in complexity. Before Workday, we manually reconciled data from a large number of systems. It was laborious. It was time intensive. The whole process took two, three, sometimes four weeks to generate reporting and insight on what happened a month before, which was limiting.
With Workday, we have real-time data around our projects, our time and our billing, all the way through the cycle. We can see that data throughout the month, and the month-end close work is automated and available immediately. This eliminated the manual data reconciliation and report creation process, freeing up our teams to apply their time more strategically and providing our leaders with a 360-degree view of people and financial data in one system with self-service reporting capability.
It’s amazing to look back now and see the huge benefits Workday has brought us. Twenty-seven systems down to one is an incredible reduction in redundant data and redundant processes.
What were the firm’s largest external vulnerabilities before partnering with Workday?
Blowers: With fewer college students graduating with accounting degrees, the accounting industry is focusing not only on recruitment but also on maximizing staff efficiency. Thankfully, our ERP transformation has optimized our staff’s time and ensured their skills are used effectively. We’re also exploring ways to provide our staff with diverse experiences across various clients and industries to help them become stronger professionals in the future—that all starts with integrated data and systems. Through Workday and an integrated partnership with Dayshape, we’ll now be able to schedule staff holistically, balancing economics, preferences, skills, client needs and staff development.
How has this digital transformation improved Plante Moran’s ability to increase revenue and deliver more value?
Blowers: The increased speed-to-insight allows us to more quickly address issues that may arise in serving our clients. Also, having a 360-degree view of our people and data allows us to better grow and develop our staff. Lastly, being able to view resource capacity across the firm ensures we have the right people on the right client projects at the right time.
What does future readiness look like for Plante Moran, and how has the transformation helped strengthen it?
Blowers: Throughout our firm’s 100-year history, we’ve continued to focus on providing best-in-class service to clients. When we started building out a new business strategy, we reflected on our journey to $1 billion in revenue and evaluated what foundational capabilities we would need to advance to $2 billion—that next leg of growth. Beyond revenue growth, we also considered the growing complexity of our business, as well as the growing complexity of our clients’ needs and services. We determined an ERP transformation would be the right strategy for our future.
In addition, with the dawn of generative AI, we recently refreshed our AI strategy. It’s crucial for us to have all our data managed in a single system and to partner with a forward-thinking technology provider like Workday. This partnership ensures we stay current with innovations and continue to receive AI features and functions across our ERP ecosystem. Workday and Plante Moran also share common values and approaches with AI, including maintaining a high-degree of responsibility around AI and being use-case and value driven.
How did you demonstrate short-term ROI on this transformation?
Blowers: Focusing on speed-to-value and quick wins was important to us. So rather than taking a monolithic ‘big bang’ approach, we conducted a phased implementation, starting with human capital management. This allowed us to introduce the platform to our users and see immediate ROI and capitalize on quick wins. Meanwhile, we built out the rest of the foundation for finance and professional services automation.
Throughout our ERP transformation, we really rallied around the concept of a minimum viable product. It’s a way of working that speeds up the time-to-value and reinforces a feedback loop that’s essential during the change management process.
Finally, it’s important to consider ERP as a strategic platform that you’re going to grow with over time. The ROI is about enabling future use cases and agility that you haven’t even thought about. That’s why it’s critical to select a trusted partner, like Workday.
Cre: CNBC Magazine
