Strong organic growth and acquisitions across Europe meant Webhelp needed to harmonise its controlling and financial management. Accelerated system integration ensured the necessary data quality as the basis for operational decisions. Webhelp's goal was to keep the complexity of the processes low despite the dynamic business development and to use automation to support efficient management across the company.
In particular, it wanted to break down silos between individual areas of responsibility and create true transparency across the organisation through a comprehensive cross linking of key figures.
Complexity will always slow down any growth. Now we have a clear focus on the company’s success.
CFO DACH, Webhelp
Ease of use and rapid roll-outs.
Following the ‘buy and build’ growth strategy, Webhelp has expanded its international presence from five to more than 55 countries over the past 10 years to become the global market leader.
Creating transparency and efficient processes for the Finance function was its most important priority. However, its dynamic growth meant that no existing enterprise resource management (ERP) systems could be guaranteed to be future-proof. So the decision was taken to use a completely new solution with Workday Financial Management.
Its modern look and feel, its user-friendliness and its use of the cloud services model ensured fast roll-out cycles for international locations. The Workday implementation started in 2019. Just a few months after go-live, roll-outs began at selected locations. Two years later, around 70% of total sales across the company’s entire footprint are managed via Workday.
Reliable, actionable data is shared across the organisation.
The demands of international corporate management make it an important success factor for Webhelp to consistently link key performance indicators (KPIs) from book-keeping and accounting with those from management and production.
With Workday Financial Management as the central system, Webhelp was able to set up a consistent set of KPIs for the whole company. This means that key figures, with all their connections and dependencies, are both reliable and comprehensive. All stakeholders now have access to the same information, meaning they can take action based on a shared understanding of the relevant key figures.
Precisely understanding the outcomes of actions taken.
The transparency Workday enables saves time and creates a clear focus on business-critical topics. This includes defining, implementing and tracking actions that improve results, optimise costs and simplify processes.
The fundamental figures, which are transparent for everyone, facilitate cross-departmental collaboration and strengthen the role of the finance team to provide guidance. An example of this is provided by the production departments, which work together with the business partners controlling the team for possible optimisation, identifying relevant drivers and understanding the outcomes of individual actions.
CFO team freed to focus on priorities and compliance assured.
Webhelp sees a central technological advantage in taking away responsibility for technical challenges such as IT security, server issues, annual changes or release changes from the team around the CFO. This leaves more scope to concentrate on the core business and process optimisation.
What matters most for Webhelp is the openness of the system, which allows easy connection with and between country-specific third-party systems. Above all, user-friendliness and the documented compliance set by the system is convincing for the user. This means, for example, that audits with internal or external auditors run smoothly.