The City of Akron serves nearly 198,000 residents across a workforce of 2,300 employees. For years, the city relied on 30-year-old on premise legacy systems that had long outlived their usefulness. These platforms were fragmented, maintenance heavy, and dependent on manual processes at almost every turn.
The impact of these disconnected legacy platforms extended to several critical operational inefficiencies. Paper-based HR processes meant that leave requests were tracked by hand, leaving managers without visibility into staffing availability. Furthermore, engineers were forced to perform redundant data entry by logging time in both project billing and payroll systems. Finally, security settings had to be manually mirrored across multiple disconnected systems, adding unnecessary administrative overhead.
The city needed a single cloud platform capable of unifying HR, Finance, and Payroll. This platform had to support a diverse workforce where hundreds of employees had never logged into a PC for work purposes, while keeping pace with the demands of a modern, data driven city government.
We were stagnant for so many years. Workday gave us a pathway for growth and we haven’t stopped since.
Chief Technology Officer
One platform replaced years of redundant overhead.
Workday provided the unified foundation the city required, delivering rapid and measurable improvements. By decommissioning multiple legacy systems in favor of a single application, the city eliminated the need to mirror security settings across platforms while avoiding more than 1 million dollars in recurring HR system upgrade costs. Furthermore, software expenses became entirely predictable through a subscription model. Digital workflows successfully replaced legacy paper processes:
- Streamlined Operations: Engineers moved from double entry to a single time entry across both project billing and payroll.
- Empowered Employees: Employee self service significantly reduced calls to the Payroll Division. Crucially, 600 employees who had never used a PC for work purposes gained access to self service and mobile capabilities.
- Modernized Procurement: Vendor payments moved from physical mail to ACH, reducing late and missed payments.
Beyond immediate operational gains, these changes laid the groundwork for a platform capable of growing with the city into entirely new frontiers.
A foundation built for continuous growth.
The City of Akron did not stop at go-live. Since replacing its legacy systems, it has continued expanding the Workday platform footprint. The Learning Management System recently went live, Workday Recruiting is coming online, and Contract Lifecycle Management is currently in deployment, bringing order to a process that had long been decentralized across city departments.
The city is already exploring Workday Agents, with early AI use cases showing clear potential for managers, employees, and finance teams. What makes this expansion possible is the deliberate choice to work within the Workday ecosystem. Operating within a single, unified platform allows Akron to deploy its resources more effectively, directing time, budget, and people toward innovation rather than integration. As Workday continues to evolve, Akron evolves with it, utilizing a staff that already knows the system and data that is already in place.
Every time Workday innovates, it gives us the ability to innovate. We’ve chosen to stay in this ecosystem.
Chief Technology Officer
A city that serves its people better at every level.
Transformation at Akron is not measured only in cost savings. It is measured in the quality of every employee's day. When a manager no longer has to submit a ticket to find overtime totals, that is time reclaimed. When an employee checks their remaining PTO without calling HR, that is friction removed.
Although Akron is in the early days of exploring Workday Agents, the potential impact is already clear. Questions are getting answered faster, freeing up the people who used to answer them to focus on strategy, analysis, and the decisions that move the city forward.
The simplicity of Workday lowers the bar for adoption across a workforce that is not uniformly technical. As Chief Technology Officer, Darren Rosenek notes, “Change management for AI is straightforward. Employees do not need to understand the technology behind the answer; they simply type a question and get one.”
Our training model becomes beautifully basic: type your question. If it gives you what you need, you’re done; if it doesn’t, that’s when you pick up the phone.
Chief Technology Officer
A platform and a partner for what comes next.
For a city government operating with finite staff and budget, and multi-year planning cycles, the question of where to place your technology bets is existential. The City of Akron's answer has been to center Workday as the fully operational tentpole of the city, building outward from a platform that is already deeply embedded in daily operations.
As Akron ventures further into AI, adopting it responsibly means navigating a trifecta of security, ethics, and responsibility that most tools cannot meet simultaneously. The compliance landscape is also shifting as states are codifying new cybersecurity standards, raising the bar for what municipalities must demonstrate before deploying emerging technologies. The partnership with Workday ensures that innovation and fiscal responsibility move forward together.
Once you have all the pieces in place, you’re not really climbing the mountain anymore—you’re seeing the entire landscape.
Chief Technology Officer