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CASE STUDY
Public Service

Transforming the Mile High City with Workday cloud

Workday transformation turns the City and County of Denver into a top employer.

Call for change

Eliminating cost and waste

The City and County of Denver’s (CCD) workforce was rapidly growing - and its 15-year-old legacy technology systems were struggling to keep up. Its HR and finance departments maintained a highly customized, expensive, and unsupported ERP solution and relied on 22 servers, 34 databases, and siloed applications. City leadership decided to pivot to a mobile-ready, cloud-first strategy to eliminate costly on-premises servers and manual processes. CCD required analytics capabilities to scale services and help the workforce focus on value-added activities. CCD leadership decided to deploy Workday’s finance and human resources solution in the cloud, and chose Accenture to lead the transformation.

The mile high city reaches for the cloud: City and County of Denver

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"As a CHRO, reliance on successful business partnerships is crucial, particularly when implementing a powerful HCM application such as Workday. Our partnership with Accenture provided the critical expertise we needed to transition to Workday..."

— KAREN NIPARKO, Former Chief Human Resources Officer – City and County of Denver

When tech meets human ingenuity

Strategizing for continual improvement

Accenture worked closely with CCD’s executive leadership to ensure anything that could be standardized and done within Workday, would be. Business processes that could be eliminated or improved, or gaps where new processes were needed, were identified. With CCD’s executive leadership in the room during this process, the program gained firm stakeholder buy-in. Accenture brought staff from every CCD department together for a change management program. Human Capital Management (HCM) and Payroll were integrated first, followed by Financials, with further modules integrated as Workday released them. Accenture led the deployment, including configuration, integration, data migration, and testing.

A valuable difference

Empowering the workforce

Workday helped CCD eliminate 75% of manual paper processes and automate more than 6,600 HR processes. Departments generate reports instantaneously, and Workday Recruiting enables recruiters to see the diversity of candidate pools at the click of a button. It now takes 45-50 days to fill positions, rather than 90, and CCD hired 85 candidates in under five days for urgent COVID-19 related work thanks to Denver’s Rapid Hire process. Prism Analytics helped CCD standardize millions of historical job applications, access data not housed in Workday, and retire legacy systems. CCD uses its new, holistic view of workforce needs to garner insights on how to increase retention, while workers enjoy the benefits of mobile access and can adjust their benefits or payroll details directly in Workday.

The transformation had an impressive and tangible impact, including being named by Forbes as a top 10 employer in the city of Denver.

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44%

less time-to-hire. Reduced from 90 days to 45-50 days, on average.

75%

of manual paper processes eliminated.

6.6K

HR processes automated.

55K

applicants processed through Workday Recruiting in 2018, with 1,300 people hired.

25K

pieces of paper saved by the city because of Non-purchase order vouchers.

85

candidates hired in two to five days for urgent work at COVID-19 testing sites and vaccine call centers as a result of Denver’s Rapid Hire process.

We derived a lot of benefits from our Workday implementation. One of the biggest ones was that we now have predictable operating costs, versus the historical, expensive, unpredictable capital expenditures...

— CHRIS BINNICKER, Former Deputy CIO – CCD

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