A holistic approach to data management.
As one of New York’s highest-quality not-for-profit health insurers, Healthfirst faced challenges with manual processes, disparate systems, and difficulty in leveraging data for informed decision-making. The organization needed a solution that could streamline operations, enhance visibility, and empower its workforce to continue to innovate in support of its mission to provide high-quality, affordable plans at every stage of life.
Healthfirst found the answer in Workday, a unified platform that integrates HR and finance data to provide a holistic view of the organization’s performance. This single source of truth enables leaders to make timely, informed decisions and plan efficiently.
“At Healthfirst, one of the big advantages of having all of our HCM and finance data on one platform is that it allows for an integrated view of our overall performance,” says Craig Barattin, vice president of Finance, and Controller.
Unlocking skills data with Workday Illuminate™.
Healthfirst has been on a journey to enhance its HR technology and practices.
Workday Illuminate has led to significant advancements in Healthfirst’s HR processes, particularly around skills management. One of the key initiatives was getting skills data into the system to support its learning experience platform.
“We enabled Workday Skills Cloud for a limited population in an effort to get skills into the system,” says Radhika Parekh, senior manager, HR Technology Programs. With 1,400+ job descriptions, manually mapping skills was a daunting task. This is where the Workday AI Gateway—a feature within Workday Extend that enables developers to build intelligent apps—came in.
Parekh explains, “Our in-house developers were able to create a solution pretty quickly. With Workday Illuminate, we were able to save 700 human hours and extrapolate 35,000 skills from 1,400 job descriptions, and then map those against the Workday Skills Cloud database. Now we have a list of skills mapped against each of our job profiles in the system.
“The AI helped us enhance and support human input, not replace, which was key for us,” Parekh continues. “We were able to produce much better data quality as those skills were from the Workday Skills Cloud database.”
This foundation will support future initiatives such as skills gap analysis, internal mobility, and skills-based hiring.
Streamlining financial operations and enhancing visibility.
Healthfirst deployed Workday Financial Management to streamline its financial operations and gain greater visibility into financial performance. The organization has seen significant improvements in efficiency, enabling its finance team to focus on more strategic work.
“We deployed the grants module to address some needs that we had from an internal perspective to effectively leverage the technology to eliminate a lot of manual work,” says Barattin. “Having everything entered directly into Workday and flowing right into the general ledger created significant efficiencies for the grants team, allowing them to move away from some of the older data entry methods that they had to manage.”
Supplier bulk invoicing delivers time savings.
Automating the process of downloading large volumes of invoice data is also saving time for the Healthfirst accounts payable team.
“By using the bulk invoice download, we’ve been able to save approximately 20 to 40 hours over an audit with respect to large invoice requisitions,” Barattin estimates.
Now AP analysts can focus more on analysis of supplier accounts to ensure accurate and timely invoice processing.
Ensuring continued success.
Having an expert at hand is helpful when you are innovating at the speed of Healthfirst. The company uses Workday Success Plans for expert support and guidance.
According to Parekh, “We are a huge fan of Workday Success Plans at Healthfirst. We especially love the Ask an Expert service, and we always use our three weekly tickets. The support we receive from the skilled consultants is consistently top quality and is especially helpful for our Workday AI Gateway solution.”
At Healthfirst, it’s very important for us to continue to leverage the new functionality that Workday is introducing.
Vice President of Finance, and Controller