Author Archives: base8innovations

Preos announced as Gold sponsor

We are pleased to announce that Preos is a Gold sponsor of Workday Rising (Europe) in 2022.

The event, which takes place in Stockholm between the 15 to 17 of November inclusive, brings together a community of Workday customers, prospective customers, and partners. Nearly 3,000 people are expected to attend the event, which is being held in Stockholmsmässan in Stockholm.

The theme for the 2022 event is change: preparing for it, managing it, adapting to it and making it. Among the nearly 200 speaker and panel sessions, will be a keynote speech by Björn Ulvaeus, who will discuss how ABBA has remained relevant since the seventies.

What to expect from Preos at Workday Rising 2022

Preos will have a strong presence at Workday Rising, with a large stand in the expo area staffed by experts from our fast-growing team of Workday specialists. Please drop by to say hello or to discuss any challenges you are facing with Workday. We’d be pleased to help.

You can enter our prize draw for a free Workday review by scanning the QR code on our stand and entering a few details. We’ll also be sponsoring a coffee stand throughout the event where you can pick up a reviving caffeine hit should expo exhaustion kick in.

We are also running a panel session. In A Mile in Our Shoes, Preos Advisor Mark Judd will interview Ros Marshall, Vice President, Human Resources (Global) at Jimmy Choo, and Ben Dudley (Preos CEO) to discuss how the luxury brand has taken opportunities to optimise Workday across HCM, Absence, Recruiting, Advanced Compensation and Payroll integrations. Visitors can book a place via the Workday Rising app – and we’re pleased to say the session is filling fast.

Finally, Preos experts Philippe Lauret and Andy Bradshaw, will be running Braindate sessions in which they will discuss various Workday challenges with users.

Preos Braindate Sessions include:

• Purging Strategies – Meeting Requirements for purging data and complying with 6 years plus 1 legislation
• Onboarding – Workday and Identity Access Management. Pre-hire access non-SAML and day one access with SAML
• Did someone say IT Privileged access? 3 Steps to keep your auditors happy
• Stuck processes (MOM) and data remediation and digging yourself out of a hole

Braindates can be booked on the Workday Rising app.

You can register for Workday Rising (Europe) here. We look forward to seeing you there.

Email us to reserve a meeting slot with one of our experts at Workday Rising.

Mark Judd was Vice President of Product Strategy EMEA at Workday for more than four years.

During that time, he was responsible for connecting Workday’s customer requirements with product design. Mark’s championing of the customer-led to a series of innovative developments that helped consolidate Workday’s position as the leader in its field and maintained its excellent record for customer satisfaction. Before joining Workday he was the HR Services Solution Lead at Rolls-Royce. 

Mark left Workday in 2021, and since then has been building a career as an independent advisor to a portfolio of clients, including Preos, where he helps us build a greater understanding of Workday customers’ requirements and priorities. 

In this interview, Mark shares his views on Workday Optimisation and explains why he has chosen to act as an advisor to Preos.

We are delighted to have his support.

Transcript

Meet Mark Judd 

Hello, my name’s Mark Judd. I am a Strategic Advisor to Preos. I started working with Preos in the middle of 2021. 

Prior to that I was the Vice President of Product Strategy for Workday, for Europe Middle East and Africa. And before that I have had a history of senior roles in operational HR for companies like Toyota, Price Waterhouse Coopers and Rolls Royce. 

You were approached by several organisations, why did you choose to work with Preos? 

The reason I wanted to work with Preos is after 4 and a half years of being the Vice President of Product Strategy with Workday, I retired from my full-time role in middle of 2021, and I was looking to do something that I would find truly interesting. Create a portfolio of activities. Some Workday related and some not so much Workday related. But there was an element of that I wanted to focus on, which was around helping customers optimise their product that I had been involved in, in helping to roll out across the European theatre.  

I also happened to know the Preos guys for many years, David and Ben, and liked them very much. And so, it was a great opportunity to align the stars and bring things together. Work with people that I liked that I trusted, but also do something which I think fundamentally moved the value proposition for customers on so that they could get the most out of their Workday products.  

Do you believe the demand for this kind of support is new? 

I don’t think the demand for this kind of support is new. In fact, when I think back to when I was a Workday customer around about 2015, I identified very early on that the more sophisticated the product became and the more that we as a business wanted to adopt it during my time at Rolls Royce, the more we would need support, partnership in helping to optimise the product. What was interesting is at that time there was very little in the market that was around post-implementation aftercare support for really making the most of the Workday product. And I remember having a number of conversations with providers and partners at the time, but the real focus was very much on helping businesses go live and less so around helping businesses optimise.  

Should an AMS take care of Workday Optimisation? 

In my mind, there is a very big difference between what AMS offers, which is really about release management, testing, ticket management etc. And there is a place for that for most organisations to have that support to supplement the internal operational teams that they have and the whole process of optimising a cloud technology such as Workday. There is a difference. You need that kind of more sophisticated understanding around enhancement when it comes to optimisation. It isn’t AMS. It isn’t a routine. It isn’t a batch process or routine testing activity. It’s getting into the strategic requirements of the business. Understanding what is important to them. Helping to look at the match between those business objectives and then relating that back to the Technology to ensure that what is deployed is done so on an intelligent and well-constructed roadmap. 

Do you see this as remedial work for customers who are in trouble or is it more than that? 

This is more than just remedial work for customers, but it is true that some customers may have found they have lost pace through successive releases. Their operational teams, that may have been quite substantial at the point of go live could well have reduced in size or they may have seen successive releases come and go without optimising what is there. So, there is a degree of support that can be offered to catch up to make the most of what Workday can offer to date.  But it is more than that it is also priming organisations for what is coming in the future. Making sure that they have made use of all the appropriate structures, the way of organising the technology and also considering what is coming down the line in the next few releases, so they are well-positioned to take advantage of that. 

What would your advice be to a customer thinking about how to get more out of Workday? 

Customers have invested a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money, a lot of resources in putting Workday in and utilising it within their businesses, rolling it out and ensuring the change management is done. But it doesn’t stop at the point of delivery. It is a continual investment in effort and time. So, I would encourage every customer to have a very well thought through optimisation strategy and roadmap. And I think many customers will need some help to do that.  

And one of the things I particularly like about Preos is there are no distractions. It is not about new implementations. It’s all about optimisation. All about helping customers make the most of everything they have put in and sustain that level of growth and sophistication and utilisation and making the way they work the product really drive business success for them.  

As we reach the first anniversary of the launch of Preos and the end of our trading year, I wanted to share some thoughts about an exhilarating and eventful twelve months. 

Preos people are special

I need to acknowledge the massive contribution made by all our employees and associates. Without their expertise, hard work, and commitment to Preos, we could not have delivered such an outstanding performance in our first year.

It sounds trite to say our people are our greatest asset, but that doesn’t make it any less accurate.  

When we launched Preos, we prioritised investment in our people – providing training, development, fair rewards, and interesting work. 

We continue to push ourselves to increase the support we give to our teams and make Preos a destination for talented people who want an exciting career in the Workday world. 

In our first few weeks, the team agreed on the values we believe are central to our culture. We want our culture to reflect the best of our people and to have a positive impact on how we work with our clients and partners.

We agreed four keywords that summarise and shape our culture. 

• Respect for what everyone brings to the business, enabling us to get the best from each other and helping us grow as individuals. 
• Ambition drives us to improve how we work and deliver for our clients.
• Passion means we are always looking to do better and acknowledge great contributions. 
• Innovation means we strive to find new ways to manage the business and deliver our projects. 

Stick to the Knitting

We started the company with a simple proposition: Workday Optimisation.

We help organisations get the most out of their investment in Workday. We will continue to focus on that core proposition, evolving our methodology, tools, delivery mechanisms, and structures to develop our expertise further. 

Many years ago, business gurus Tom Peters and Robert Waterman said excellent businesses stick to the knitting. They focus on what they know best so they can concentrate on making the company and the service it provides the best it can be. 

We have not wavered from the core of what we do and have no intention of doing so as we continue to evolve our business to better help our customers optimise Workday.

Blips, bumps and boulders

Launching a new business is exhilarating and challenging. We have had our fair share of bumps along the way: client service hasn’t always been up to the standards we target; we haven’t had the time to address the deficiencies we know exist in our management system, and we want to do better for our team.

But we’re good at raising issues early and implementing solutions. And we’ve learned from the things we did not get right the first time. 

If we don’t continually look at how we can do better, our clients will not get the results they deserve from their investment and trust in us. We want to do brilliant work and have long term relationships with our clients. And we will only get that by learning from the blips, bumps and boulders to smooth the way for the future.

Numerical nimbleness

We set out to have a solid financial base allowing us to be a strong, independent business unbeholden to external stakeholders. And we’ve hit that target. 

When you are growing fast, you don’t have time to build business cases and analyse spending decisions in detail. You have to keep adjusting the plans, watching the trends, make nimble forecasts and quick decisions, and have the confidence to address issues when they arise.

Not everything can be a priority. Choosing what we focus on with limited resources has been vital. 

Client Credits

Finally, we are nothing without our clients. Thank you to all of you that have chosen to work with us. We appreciate it was a leap of faith and hope you feel it was worth taking. 

We appreciate it when you recognise good work and the feedback on how we can improve. The fact that we get repeat business from many clients suggests we are getting things right, and we will continue to improve and develop our delivery capability.

We look forward to the next twelve months with a combination of pride in our people and what we have achieved together and humility in our recognition that our success is not a given. We know we need to continue to work doubly hard to maintain our momentum and help our clients optimise Workday. 

And we’re ready. 

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We are pleased to announce that in recognition of our team’s expert knowledge, skills, and dedication to clients, Preos has been awarded Workday Advisory Partner status. 

This means we can access exclusive resources, content, and insights into Workday’s strategic roadmap to help customers optimise Workday and maximise return on their investment. 

Our team of consultants and subject matter experts are trained to address implementation issues, increase adoption, and introduce processes that ensure Workday meets the long-term needs of your business.

With expertise in all Workday modules, including HCM, finance and analytics, our consultants can offer support in core systems and process review, infrastructure review, adoption acceleration, support structure, roadmap planning and release management.

The Preos team offers a collaborative approach, support to minimise expensive additional resources, and advisory partner access to the most recent functionalities, tools, and services in the Workday pipeline. This ensures the delivery of a more satisfying and seamless Workday experience. 

Because go-live is just the start of the Workday story.

Preos has achieved Cyber Essentials certification in its first year of trading. 

Cyber Essentials helps organisations guard against cyber threats and demonstrates a commitment to online security. The government-backed certification means our clients can be assured we have significant measures in place to enhance data protection and to secure ourselves against cyber-attacks. 

Cyber attackers look for the most vulnerable sites to access. This certification deters the most common forms of attack by demonstrating we take security seriously. The official Cyber Essentials site likens the certificate to the digital equivalent of a sturdy lock deterring an opportunistic thief trying your front door.  

The self-assessment certification was developed by the Information Security Forum (ISF) and the Information Assurance for Small and Medium Enterprises (IASME) for businesses of all sizes. It is a prerequisite of many government contracts.  

Photo (c) Shutterstock/ Alex SG