To sign up for our daily email newsletter, CLICK HERE
According to a study, it was revealed that the retail eCommerce sector witnessed a 25.7% surge in 2020, which amounted to $4.213 trillion, however, it has been projected that the global retail eCommerce sales will climb a further 16.8% in 2021, to $4.921 trillion. This is a tremendous leap, and the eCommerce businesses must do everything necessary to ensure they continue to enjoy this boom.
Two important areas, eCommerce businesses will be expected to focus on will be human resource management or human capital management (HCM) and financial management. Incidentally, these are the two areas that Workday prides on. As a cloud-based application, Workday has experienced astonishing growth over the years, the platform expanded from an HCM application into an enterprise resource planning (ERP) as well.
The platform offers one of the most powerful solutions in the market, but a lot of eCommerce businesses may be put off by the nagging Workday implementation issues. The time frame necessary for Workday implementation is between 6 months to 14 months, but on average you can have something like 8.2 months required to execute in your eCommerce business.
Since you are going to tie down funds for this period, you must ensure there is no delay. After all, you need to quickly realize your returns on your Workday investment.
You don’t want to unnecessarily tie down funds you can use in some other areas for software you can’t readily use. To avoid the situation where you have to go through delays in enhancing your Workday adoption, you need to plan.
Here are some Workday implementation issues you may have to encounter in your eCommerce business and how to resolve them.
Lack of metrics to define your project scope
Embarking on a project can be very exciting, especially when you are all geared up. However, if you fail to clearly define the scope of your project, you are in serious problems. Workday is a platform, and you must know what you want to achieve.
You must have the required metrics to measure how fast, or slowly, you are going. You don’t want a chaotic situation where everybody becomes confused and loses focus.
Your project scope may be affected by these factors:
Software updates
Within every 12 months, the Workday application goes through 2 major updates. Since you are still in the implementation stage, you may be unmindful of this fact.
Knowing that you need about 8 months to implement Workday, you must plan for at least one Workday update while you are in the process of implementation. Failure to do this will cause you delays.
Lack of a clear-cut strategy
Workday implementation issues derive from not having a clear-cut strategy. When there are no clearly stated goals, the eCommerce business will resort to fumbling, employees and even customers will be confused at what the brand has set out to transform.
Every hand needs to be on deck; everybody must have a clear picture of what to do and when to do so; this removes delays often experienced with Workday implementation. When all the stakeholders are on the same page, you are successfully eliminating Workday implementation issues.
Changes in the organizational culture
A very serious mistake you may make is not realizing that there are bound to be changes in your employees’ culture. You shouldn’t see implementations as just the adoption of new technologies; the roles employees play will be affected, and they should be prepared for this.
They should have the right mindset, and collaboration is one thing you don’t joke with. You don’t need to be reminded that the success of your HCM lies heavily on the usage.
For this reason, you have the task of ensuring that both the organization and employees benefit from the changes you are introducing; it must increase the employee experience. Focusing on how implementations will impact the employee, you will be ready to absorb the challenges that will definitely surface from the angle of the employees. This is very important as you will be embarking on large-scale transformations.
Effective collaboration and communication
Especially now that there have been dramatic changes to the way people work, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, you can’t overemphasize the role of collaboration tools in ensuring you remove Workday implementation issues. Workday implementations now that most people work remotely is another ball game altogether.
As different teams are needed for effective implementations, it means that you must focus on involving the leadership, mid-level managers, and end-users. At the same time, you must not forget the roles of HR, finance, and IT.
You need to understand the importance of workday implementations to functional groups such as the supply chain, the application will be very useful in the conduct of their duties. Where will you put product adoption if the supply chain is not involved in the implementations processes?
What collaboration tools will you use to stay in touch with your service partners, consultants, and other professionals you may need to outsource some tasks to? Your employees should be able to communicate freely and effectively with these groups; when you have lapses in your communication efforts, it can lead to project failures.
Since you need funds to effectively embark and conclude your implementations, you should involve the relevant stakeholders from the onset. This will help a great deal to facilitate your processes.
Proactively approaching change management
What you end up achieving in your eCommerce business by deploying Workday is to merge the functionality of many apps into one platform. This ensures that your employees have to abandon some legacy systems; this is a change management requirement and must be done with caution.
They will see a lot of the processes as strange and may even want to put up some form of resistance; if you don’t make them see reasons with you, your efforts may be sabotaged. If you can figure this out in advance, it will go a long way in redressing workday implementation issues that may crop up later.
What you need is a prioritized software onboarding process. Even where all the apps are in one place, it will ease things, but that does not mean that your employees will catch up with the way things should go readily.
