Lake County project leads told the Technology Committee on Aug. 1 that the county has completed configuration unit testing for its new Workday enterprise resource planning system and has launched a five-week end-to-end testing stage that uses Lake County data and covers cross-department processes.

Project staff said configuration unit testing covered more than 2,700 scenarios with more than 60 team members and that the current end-to-end testing includes over 1,000 scenarios designed to exercise real business processes from requisition to final approval. "This is where we're gonna really look at all of the end to end processes from start to finish," a project lead said.

Staff described benefits expected from Workday including automated invoice ingestion and pre-population of invoice data to streamline workflows, centralized data visualizations and a single source of truth for county data. "Workday is going to scrape the mailbox. It's going to scrape those attachments. It's going to prepopulate data from those attachments, those invoices into the system, and then put it into the queues for the employees to start reviewing it," a project lead said.

Change management activities are under way: department head and senior leader briefings, development of job aids and training materials, identification of major process changes for job-impact analysis, and a network of change champions. Staff said roughly 90% of county data has been loaded into the test environment and that end-to-end testing will reveal remaining configuration adjustments. The county reported the project is on schedule and that testing has already surfaced items addressed by the implementation team.

Committee members asked about timeline and readiness; project staff reiterated the program's phased testing plan and said the end-to-end testing period is a planned time to find and correct process issues. The county did not announce a final Go-Live date at the meeting but said the testing phase and accompanying training and communications are on the current project timeline.