A major, multi-year initiative to replace the University’s legacy financial systems with a modern cloud-based system is gaining momentum, achieving key milestones and staying on track for completing the Readiness Phase by June of 2019.
As part of the “Readiness Phase,” the UW Finance Transformation(UWFT) program has designed and implemented a governance structure, hired program staff, engaged with leadership and stakeholders, hired a Readiness vendor partner, and selected the finance platform, Workday Financials.
More recently, the program team completed a University-wide Benchmarking and Data Gathering study to document and evaluate the systems, integrations and reports that support our current state. “This was a massive sprint that required active participation by hundreds of experts in every unit across the University,” said Aaron Powell, vice president for UW-IT and chief information officer, and a UWFT program sponsor.
“It was an incredible feat to achieve 100 percent, on time participation, especially given the effort took place during what is quite possibly these experts’ busiest time of year,” he said.
With support from the new Readiness Phase partner, Deloitte, the UWFT program team just completed validation and analysis of the data gathered, which is enabling the program to move forward with confidence into the next stage of Readiness: development of the future state design, operating model, and Workday prototype.
The UWFT program is the largest UW administrative modernization effort to date, larger in scale than the recently completed HR, payroll, benefits and time-tracking system implementation of Workday. The program involves a complex, multifaceted effort to replace the University’s aging 43-year-old Finance Accounting System (FAS), along with its multiple side systems and processes — a switch that will drive fundamental changes to the processes, policies and tools that the UW employs to track, spend, collect, manage and report University finances. Find out more about UW Finance Transformation and read the latest updates.