Built around a powerful research and data analytics core, Material helps clients achieve ambitious growth through insight-driven brand strategy, customer experience, and product design and development. Material has a 50-year history helping world-class companies accelerate and dominate in their respective industries. The organization does this through proprietary behavioral science approaches that unlock a deep understanding of the drivers of customer demand, combined with advanced data, analytics, and AI that enable the prediction and influence of demand curves to accelerate growth. In addition to serving the corporate market, Material has helped some of the world’s most celebrated cultural icons extend their personal brands into new product lines and the most influential companies globally to generate new pathways to expanding their impact.
“We help brands shape culture and ignite ambitious growth for companies,” said Lisa Marie Hadley, vice president, Finance. With an eye on continued growth, Material had several operational needs to address. Chief among those challenges involved consolidating about 50 disparate and siloed finance and HR systems inherited through 13 acquisitions in recent years.
Hadley said the organization streamlined operations to increase productivity and collaboration with a unified Workday platform. “We moved our entire organization—everyone from full-time employees to contingent workers—into a single system like our partners Salesforce and Zimit use as well,” Hadley said.
Integrated platform drives efficiency.
Material’s financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team reduced time-to-close to seven days with input from finance and human resources. “Each month, we knocked another day off close because we automated tasks with our integrated system,” Hadley said. “For the first time, we have a simplified view of how we close. That was a huge transformation.”
Material, which has 1,400 employees across the globe, completes routine tasks, such as expense reports, faster so employees can focus on growing their clients’ business. “If we spend even 10 percent less on expense reports, that’s extra time we can spend on our clients,” Hadley said. “That’s a huge win.”
Material also created a Project Simplify team to eliminate redundant and unnecessary steps. “Having one place for Project Simplify and other teams to access, analyze, and input reports and other information is hugely meaningful,” Hadley said.
Our partnership with Workday allows us to share our vision with Workday experts and impact the future of professional services automation.
Vice President, Operations
Gain a holistic view of operations.
Material manages, forecasts, plans, schedules, and bills projects with Workday Professional Services Automation (PSA). The New York City-based firm uses Workday PSA to gain a holistic view of staffing needs, accurately analyze profitability, and automate project forecasting and budgeting.
“It’s important we understand how we’re working through contracts with our customers, staying on track with what we scoped,” said Lindsay Rosen, vice president, Operations. “Through the Workday PSA module, we understand the current and projected financial health of projects and track the most important asset we have—our people.”
Rosen said they analyze the cost of internal expenses, vendors, and contingent labor to help them staff projects because they get clear insights into how employees spend their time. “We just have so much more information to make project and customer decisions,” Rosen said. “We now see our operations data from end-to-end, from quote-to-cash.”
Increased collaboration helps stakeholders.
Rosen said they have a strong cross-functional operations team that uses a unified system to work on initiatives that touch various lines of business. “When we talk about HCM, finance, or PSA, 9 times out of 10 the initiative affects all those teams,” Rosen said. “We have a very collaborative way of working together.”
Hadley agreed. “One of the most important things we’ve done organizationally is realize that the solution has to be universal. Nothing lives in isolation any longer.”
At the end of the day, what we present to our board and leadership is a unified view of the data. That’s a powerful way to operate.
Vice President, Operations
Leverage AI for smart growth.
With their time spent at 2024 Workday Rising, Hadley and Rosen were excited and hopeful about the new developments in the AI capabilities in Workday. They plan to further streamline and automate their capabilities with Workday Illiuminate™ in the future. Material plans to use Illuminate to accelerate common tasks, deliver real-time help, and streamline standard business processes.
Hadley and Rosen look forward to the next chapter with Workday. “Continuing to elevate what our employees do to help our clients help their customers is very exciting,” Hadley says. “We feel we made the right choice with Workday to grow and evolve because, like us, their foot is always on the accelerator.”