Washington County staff: Workday rollout will automate finance and HR, centralize grants tracking

Washington County staff told county leaders that a planned rollout of the Workday enterprise resource planning system will automate multiple finance and human-resources processes, centralize grants tracking and require more training and staffing, according to remarks recorded during the meeting.

County presenters described automation of tasks such as consolidated bank reconciliations and cost-center approval workflows in finance, and automated open-enrollment and enhanced job-profile reporting in human resources. "This will make life easier for workforce members and managers," a staff member said.

Those changes are intended to standardize data across the county using Workday's "work tag" system and to provide leaders with consolidated financial reporting, dashboards and real-time analytics. "Information at our fingertips," the staff member said, adding that Workday will also create a centralized historical data repository to support faster, data-informed decisions.

Why it matters: county presenters said Washington County employs more than 2,000 people and relies on many legacy processes and spreadsheets. Staff said the two-decade-old legacy solution has required workarounds and that moving to Workday is intended to improve data integrity, reduce error-prone manual steps and simplify reporting for decision-makers.

Project background and vendor support

Staff credited an external consultant, Barry Dunn, with assisting on a needs assessment and vendor negotiations. The consultant helped the county develop a more than 20-page needs assessment and advised on vendor fees and selection, staff said. County presenters also said they assigned a dedicated project team and backfilled positions to support implementation.

Change management, training and staffing concerns

Presenters repeatedly emphasized change-management challenges. Staff acknowledged that change is hard and said earlier and broader workforce engagement would have reduced anxiety. They said the county ran training and implementation in parallel for some employees, which increased workload for staff who were expected to learn the new system while continuing project tasks. "In the future, I think that that would definitely be a thing that we would like to do is start some of these employees sooner into the training modules," the staff member said.

Staff also said they continue to learn staffing needs as the project proceeds and appreciated that the county had included an "additional authorization line" for staffing in the budget or authorization package to help backfill roles. A commissioner thanked the project team and noted the county's size and workforce: "...this agency can continue to function at the size that it is, right, in the 2,000 plus employees," the commissioner said.

Operational impacts mentioned

- Finance: consolidated bank reconciliations, cost-center approvals, reduced reliance on Excel workbooks and PDF templates. - HR: automated open enrollment, enhanced job-profile reporting, and self-service recruiting workflows that allow managers to initiate and track requests within Workday. - Grants: staff said grants historically managed in spreadsheets will be tracked in Workday going forward. - Data standardization: use of Workday "work tags" to label departments, divisions, grants and projects for consistent reporting.

Limitations and next steps

Presenters did not provide a specific go-live date in the recorded remarks and said some implementation details remain under development. They described ongoing workforce engagement activities including surveys, listening sessions and one-on-one conversations. Staff repeatedly raised the need for continued adjustment of FTE allocations and earlier training for end users to reduce implementation burden.

The meeting segment concluded with staff and commissioners expressing support for the work and noting further business would be taken up in the county's subsequent business meeting; no formal vote on the project was recorded in the provided transcript segment.