Accenture and Workday expand partnership to deliver composable finance solutions

Accenture and Workday are expanding their partnership, aiming to help organizations reinvent their finance functions to be more agile, data-driven, and customer-centric. The collaboration combines Accenture’s industry and functional knowledge, innovation, and interoperability experience with Workday’s robust technology platform, foundational data model and advanced analytics.

“CFOs are challenged to optimize spend and increase profit margins, while finding new ways to leverage data to drive profitable growth,” said Emma McGuigan, senior managing director and enterprise and industry technologies lead at Accenture. “To help our clients be truly agile and drive real-time reinvention, our expanded collaboration with Workday will provide pre-integrated finance solutions that let organizations plug the technologies of tomorrow into today’s business.”

The companies are collaborating to develop a suite of data-led, composable finance solutions that can be configured and reconfigured to help clients in the software and technology, retail, and media industries be more responsive to changing business requirements.

The industry-specific solutions are jointly created to integrate with Workday Financial Management to accelerate the optimization of a company’s core financial operations. Powered by data and analytics, the offerings will digitize processes through intelligent automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) and will help reduce costs, improve operational efficiencies, and empower the workforce with new skills needed to thrive in an evolving environment, according to the companies.

The new offerings align with the Workday Industry Accelerators’ collaborative go-to-market strategy established last year to help address the increasing demand for digital transformation across multiple industries. 

“We recognize the need for intelligent solutions to enable the office of the CFO to navigate changing business environments and drive growth for their companies,” said Matthew Brandt, senior vice president of global partners at Workday. “The global partnership between Workday and Accenture brings together the power of our cloud-native platform with AI and ML at the core and some of the industry’s most forward-thinking and innovative experts to help our customers take advantage of transformative technologies to accelerate change across their financial operations while remaining adaptable and resilient.”

Accenture and Workday are working with Salesforce to implement a robust finance technology platform as part of its objective to provide new business insights, enhance agility and improve employee experiences.

With design and execution support from Accenture, Workday Financial Management—combined with Salesforce tools—will provide Salesforce with solutions to help streamline its finance processes and standardize its operations globally, according to the company.

Accenture and Workday are working together to develop nine offerings intended to address specific business needs across three industries:

• Software and technology industry solutions address key challenges clients are facing around customer billing—including subscription and consumption billing—revenue planning and spend optimization. Solutions include quote-to-cash, financial planning and analysis, and spend and cash flow optimization.
• Retail industry solutions help customers with planning, store operations, and workforce management. They are designed to include pre-packaged integrations, configurations and reports to optimize the integration of Workday Financial Management with other best-of-breed merchandising and inventory solutions.
• Media industry offerings focus on production finance, monetization and contracts, and title amortization. They integrate industry-specific platforms, purpose-built for training media production and the monetization of media assets with a modern digital core of Workday Financial Management.

The expanded partnership between the two organizations builds on more than 15 years of joint efforts to strengthen resilience and advance technology transformation across HR and Finance operations for joint customers worldwide. 

For more information about this collaboration, visit www.accenture.com or www.workday.com.