Crakmedia is a web company that generates an impressive amount of data and whose business complexity has created a proliferation of management systems. All of these must be able to exchange information in order to perform the basic functions of the company such as paying employees’ salaries, paying our suppliers, managing hiring and career progression, receiving payments from our customers, or simply managing time on a project.
Without a centralized system, we often have to use homemade tools to move data from one place to another, because data cannot necessarily be easily, and securely, exported.This is where the implementation of an ERP system (acronym for enterprise resource planning) makes sense and this is why Crakmedia has acquired the powerful turnkey Workday solution.
What is an ERP?
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a type of software that a company uses to manage its day-to-day operations. It centralizes all the main functions of the company such as accounting, procurement, project management, compliance, employee records management or inventory management.
ERP makes it possible to integrate all this data into a single system and link it all together in order to fully integrate all the company’s functions. For example, a customer can be easily billed at the touch of a button and the system will have direct access to employee hours, logged expenses and customer data. At the end of a month, the financial statements are automatically calculated and can be exported directly, without manual manipulation. By having a single source of data, i.e. a single source of truth, we ensure that the data is true and this significantly reduces the possibility of error.
In addition, the single source of truth allows for easy automation of a host of daily, monthly or quarterly operations, allowing much less time to be spent on generating reports and especially on validating (and revalidating) data. When a business grows and becomes more complex, it is not uncommon for the accounting team to have to spend half a month closing the previous month… and it is to be done again two weeks later. An integrated solution can therefore save several days of work, saving time that is of immense value to the company. Because the data has not been extracted, processed, and transformed multiple times, it can be ensured that it is accurate at every stage.
Similarly, hiring an employee is facilitated by the full integration of the process, from application to offer and throughout their career progression. The candidate consults the job offers directly in the ERP, creates their profile to apply and this profile follows them throughout the process and then serves as the basis for their employee profile when he or she is eventually hired. The tool keeps a complete history of the entire process, and it is easy to document each step.
Some companies will develop their own ERP to meet their specific needs, but this development time is often too long and is too great a risk that few companies can afford to assume. Turnkey solutions exist and have the great advantage of being hosted in the cloud on extremely stable IT infrastructures, available at all times, from anywhere. Workday is one of these products and is the solution that was chosen by Crakmedia to meet its needs.
5 Benefits of an ERP for Crakmedia
You could say that the terms productivity and operational efficiency are the themes of the year 2024 at Crakmedia. On May 6, our company won the Mercure Award for Productivity Increase Investissement Québec at the most recent edition of the Mercuriades, organized by the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec. This recognition crowns the great success of Crakmedia’s investments in artificial intelligence for digital performance marketing to optimize advertising placement operations.
The implementation of Workday, the ERP of choice for our company, has the same goals of optimizing and streamlining our day-to-day operations, but on a company-wide basis.
1. Consolidate management systems
Any company that is growing and diversifying its business experiences this difficulty: the multiplication of management systems and the tangle of sometimes chaotic interactions between them. An ERP like Workday can replace a host of these systems such as payroll management, accounting software, employee file management, recruitment tools and project management. It also eventually makes it possible to replace a lot of in-house tools, Excel “databases” (yes, we hear you IT people, shouting at us that Excel is not a database tool) and files updated manually or through unsecured and inflexible scripts, thus leaving a lot of room for the introduction of errors in the data.
2. Centralization of information
As we have already mentioned, an ERP makes it possible to gather all the data necessary for the daily operations of the company within a single database. The various modules (finance, employee files, project management, etc.) can therefore easily access this data and link it together in order to automate and speed up processes. We also eliminate duplication of information and have only one source to update: the single source of truth!
3. Real-time reporting
The data centralized in Workday is continuously updated, so it represents the current and true status in real time. This makes it possible to have a reliable snapshot of the company’s overall situation in order to support decision-making and adjust orientations during the month or quarter. It is no longer necessary to wait until the end of a month or quarter to get the true picture of the finances, and decisions are based on reality rather than estimates and forecasts.
4. Compliance and Risk Management
The use of a single and powerful tool such as Workday allows the company to formalize and standardize all business processes. This standardization makes it possible to better monitor it and to ensure its absolute quality by avoiding human error and data corruption during transfers between systems. We have to comply with the very demanding and complex normative framework of the web with laws and regulations that vary from one country to another, and Workday makes it easier to manage all these contexts.
5. Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility
A cloud-based tool like Workday allows us to overcome the physical limitations of our IT facilities and grow the tool as we grow. The company of 2024 is not the same as that of 2014 and that of 2034 will be completely different. Having a tool that allows this adaptability is essential. In addition, in a context where Crakmedia has employees all over North America and the world, it is important that the tool is accessible at all times, no matter where we are: whether it is in the Quebec City office, the Montreal office, our home or our employees on a business trip to meet our clients.
Why Workday?
Because it is the best ERP on the market? Absolutely! We thoroughly analyzed a dozen solutions that could have met our needs and only Workday had the ability to manage our business processes and had the flexibility we needed.
In addition, the company’s values align wonderfully with the values that are at the heart of Crakmedia’s mission: integrity, partnership, innovation, team spirit and ambition! And Workday will allow us to embody these values even better and launch Crakmedia to the top of digital performance marketing around the world (that is our ambition!). In addition, their cloud solution was the natural choice for a company like Crakmedia whose activities are 100% cloud thanks to our solid and reliable infrastructure based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions.
Workday offers an intuitive user-friendly interface that can be customized to our needs. The accounting management and talent management modules alone will save a lot of time and resources in order to use them more optimally, among other things, for business development, project management and the development of our strong employer brand.
The implementation of Workday at Crakmedia will make it possible to track every process in the company from start to finish and that each person involved knows exactly when and how they need to complete the tasks that fall under their responsibility. The arrival of Workday and its ERP allows Crakmedia to continue its journey towards optimal operational efficiency, supporting its growth for years to come.
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At Crakmedia, productivity, efficiency, and professional growth are everyday priorities. Revisit our previous articles on the subject:
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