RAVN Aerospace, a dynamic and rapidly expanding aerospace company specializing in adversary air and advanced warfighter training, found itself at a critical juncture. Having doubled its size every year since 2022, the government contractor was growing at a rate that its internal systems simply couldn't handle.
Nikki Witherspoon, RAVN’s Director of Business Operations, was struggling to manage disconnected systems for HR and payroll. The administrative burden was immense, requiring them to navigate four to five different systems, grapple with numerous logins, and struggle with mobile access. The systems didn’t communicate, which made onboarding a nightmare and risked compliance issues. “It was an unwieldy situation,” Witherspoon said. "We either needed to move to a system that was robust and could scale with us, or I was going to spontaneously combust"
Building a robust foundation with speed.
They began looking for a new system with a non-negotiable compliance requirement: CMMC Level 2 certification, which is mandated software listed on FedRAMP.gov.
The next challenge was speed. With a hard deadline to go live for their next quarter’s payroll and tax reports, RAVN opted for the expedited Workday GO.
“I didn’t think it was possible for us to get live on another system in just two months,” Witherspoon recalls.
Working closely with Workday and deployment partner ThreeLink, RAVN prioritized essential functions for Phase 1: Payroll, Time Tracking, Absence, and Human Capital Management (HCM). Less urgent functionality, such as Benefits, Learning, and Recruiting, were intentionally postponed, allowing the team to hyper-focus on the critical deployment date. The accelerated timeline of Workday GO got RAVN live in just over two months..
With Workday GO, we went live in just over two months and were able to pay our employees accurately and on time.
Director of Business Operations
Eliminating the two-week payroll nightmare.
The biggest impact was on RAVN’s payroll process. Under the old system, processing payroll involved combining data from spreadsheets, paper expense reports, and emails, all while using a timekeeping system that was never configured properly. The full process, which included manually entering accounting data, took about two weeks.
“With Workday, RAVN has cut the payroll process from two weeks to two days,” Witherspoon says.
In addition to reducing processing time, RAVN has decreased its risk of compliance issues. Workday helped uncover mistakes a previous provider made handling state taxes. Because RAVN’s pilots work across different states with complex, and occasionally neighborhood-specific tax laws, this was a critical issue to solve.
As a smaller organization with limited resources and time, RAVN Aerospace needed a solution we could deploy quickly and efficiently. That's exactly what we got with Workday GO.
Director of Business Operations
A clear flight path to future automation.
With the core HCM, Payroll, Timekeeping, and Absence components running smoothly, RAVN is getting ready to deploy Workday Financials with the ultimate goal of getting everything into Workday, including projects and billing.
The C-suite is eager to move away from manual Excel and SharePoint processes and use Workday dashboards for real-time data and faster reporting.
“Everything is working well, and I can’t wait to add financials to our capabilities,” Witherspoon says. RAVN Aerospace is now on a compliant and agile foundation, prepared for continued growth and mission success.
Three Link Solutions was an agile, collaborative partner. They integrated all of our input, and their team was proactive in addressing any issues immediately. This commitment to swift resolution was critical, given our tight timeframe.
Director of Business Operations