Minova implements Workday in eight weeks, pilots Claude-based AI portal

Workday's Ben Carter (l) with Dean Newman, Minova > Don't let the legacy thinking shape the future. That's the advice for HR transformation from Dean Newman, CIO of mining safety product company Minova, which earlier this year replaced an ageing SuccessFactors system with Workday HCM in just eight weeks. The 140-year-old company, which employs just over 1,000 people across 25 countries globally, is moving at pace to modernize its systems, and has been piloting the use of Anthropic Claude as a front-end for its people to access enterprise data and systems. Newman spoke to diginomica shortly after taking part in Workday's Elevate customer event in London this May. It's important to make sure the new system reflects the current operating model of the organization, rather than simply replicating how the existing system works, he explains: > Don't think that you're going to build a platform around what your legacy HR system thinks it is. Actually really look at it and look at the data. If you get the data right, the rest just falls into place and follows. > > > That's how you can, basically, from an agile point of view, deliver this platform really quickly. If you know exactly what you want in the time you need to do it, and box in the scope — be really clear about that — and trust the platform. The rapid implementation was delivered under the Workday Go program, in which partners specializing in the medium-sized enterprise market implement a preconfigured system and use Workday's AI-enabled deployment agent to automate previously time-consuming processes such as initial setup, data transformation and testing. Partners often add country-specific or industry-specific configurations to the core system. The aim, explains Ben Carter, VP for Technology and Emerging Enterprise at Workday, is to offer all the capabilities of the full Workday system, tailored to the individual needs of each country or industry, but delivered in a fast, cost-effective package. He says: > It's not a light version of Workday. What we had to solve for, though, to make it a fit, is make it priced in the right way, recognizing that perhaps they're not going to use all of the breadth of functionality that a large enterprise business would use, but critically getting it in, in a cost-effective way, quick time to value, but still solving for those areas of complexity &151; they might be in a regulated industry, they might be across a lot of different countries. Configuration over customization Minova, which is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, but has several of the management team including Newman based in the UK, worked with local Workday partner Three Plus Consulting. Extracting and preparing the data from SuccessFactors took another four weeks in advance of the implementation, which culminated in a big-bang cut over on a single day in mid-April, going live with core HCM, compensation and global absence, along with SSO into the organization's other applications. Phase two will add capabilities such as advanced compensation, learning, recruiting, performance and goals. Newman comments: > Just check your organization's ready, trust the platform, it will do what it says on the box. But if the data is wrong, you land up then having to correct stuff after go-live, and then you're remediating all the time. If you have that really clear view of what your organization looks like and not what you think your old HR system thinks it looks like, if you clean that up, you're just injecting that into Workday, and you get the value on day one from it. One of the advantages of the new platform is greater agility to produce reports or make changes. Minova's business supplies materials and products that are used to stabilize and secure mines, tunnels, embankments and other infrastructure, and speed of response is important. Newman says the ability to make configuration changes rather than having to call in consultants to customize the software has been a boon, both with the new Workday system and with an earlier migration to Salesforce for CRM and CPQ. He explains: > We learned a lot about the SaaS model, the benefits of configuration rather than customization. We have a strategy, which is go very lean, stick to as much out-of-the-box functionality as you can, on a sort of 80:20 rule, and bend the business to the software and not the other way round. That gives us the flexibility to be able to configure it the way we want. > > > We found with these platforms that that ability to configure and adapt the system very quickly to the changes in our business — which is quite fluid in mining safety and infrastructure and construction — that we can do this in-house at much greater speed now than we could relying on partners and having to have big budgets to be able to support it. We're doing that stuff internally, and it's been transformational from that point of view. Producing new reports, for example, is something the HR team can do themselves now instead of relying on third parties when changes are needed, which means they can produce timely information on request rather than having to wait on others. He sums up: > We've just had the benefit of that SaaS application, that quick, agile, subscription-based platform that lets us move at pace when we need to react. Small organizations with big platforms that have to customize them, it just slows you down. It's bloated. It's unnecessary. Now we can make decisions really quickly and act on them. There’s an equal willingness to take a fresh approach in the organization’s embrace of AI. Newman comments: > We're actually really pushing AI in our organization, where we're bringing automation to workflows that are very human-intensive, and where we can get benefits — not from a headcount reduction point of view, but actually bringing value to releasing people to get on with doing the important stuff, rather than the heavy lifting of paperwork flows, or whatever that might be. Minova has its own unified AI architecture called AURA based on Anthropic Claude, which provides a portal where users can ask questions and get responses from integrations to Workday, Salesforce, Evotix, Sharepoint, email and calendar apps. At the time we spoke, this was running in beta as a proof-of-concept with 35 mainly back-office users. Newman explains: > You can ask for a meeting with someone, you can find out from HR whatever it is you're asking from Workday. You can look at your pipeline in Salesforce. You could run a report that brings the two things together, and that does it in Power BI... It's proving very useful as an example of where we're applying some of that intelligent thinking to our business processes. Workday, of course, is promoting its own Sana platform as an AI front-end and in its Elevate keynote warned attendees of the risks of using generic agents that aren't aware of an organization's context and policies. But Minova has been cautious, says Newman, to ensure that its orchestration engine connects into its access management infrastructure and won’t allow users to circumvent their roles and permissions when using AI. He was encouraged that Workday’s approach complements what Minova has been doing, saying: > We've spent a bit of time thinking about the governance of the guardrails around our privacy within AI... So it was really interesting to see, and impressive that Workday is really putting that at the front of their AI thinking, because it corroborates what we need to do, as well. As I said, we're doing it internally in a proof of concept before we let it loose on our internal users. We need to validate all those things that Workday are saying you have to do... > > > Where these organizations are building specific agents for tasks and you can call on them, the more they get exposed, it's just better for companies like us that can use and lean on Workday, or Salesforce is another example, where you're using the controls and the quality of that data in that platform.