Next Level HR: Unleashing more value out of human capital management systems in healthcare

HR leaders across healthcare organizations face challenges in supporting business transformation, improving efficiency, and enhancing talent experience. They should navigate strategic planning, talent growth, retention, and acquisition within an ever-shifting economy. For many healthcare organizations, the need to leverage their human capital management (HCM) ecosystem effectively acts as a critical component to helping drive operational efficiency and navigating these challenges. However, many struggle to understand the holistic value of their HCM system investment, making it difficult to identify — and act on — areas of improvement. One not-for-profit healthcare organization serving the mid-Atlantic US faced a similar battle. Despite having Workday’s HCM in place, the organization realized that its foundational structures, data, reporting and business processes were not being effectively leveraged. To address this issue, the organization sought the experience of PwC to help realize value across their Workday HCM solution and enhance the return on their HCM investment.

Leveraging data to take action

To help identify optimization opportunities, PwC introduced Next Level HR, a PwC product, designed to help extract greater value from human capital management systems. By enhancing the functionality of HCM cloud solutions, organizations can streamline processes, strengthen security and help improve the employee experience. Our Next Level HR team analyzed six main areas of the healthcare organization’s Workday tenant and ecosystem, including the core HCM system, security, business processes, reporting governance and talent acquisition. Leveraging a human-led, tech-powered approach, PwC's team extracted data from Next Level HR and conducted in-depth discovery sessions to gain a deeper understanding of the healthcare organization's unique requirements and pain points. This enabled the PwC team to generate several outputs, including: 

• An insights report including key metrics and high-level recommendations  

• An opportunity matrix with specific enhancements and modifications  

• A Workday roadmap with remediation timeline 

Increasing HCM investments

These findings led to PwC recommending a redesign of the healthcare organization’s human capital management system across various components. Some of these findings included: 

A need for governance structures

PwC found that reporting was not as reliable, fast, or efficient in the system as the client needed. Many datasets also required manual scrubbing. This created a lack of trust in reporting precise data and unrealized value in the HCM system as an automated reporting tool. The organization needed a governance structure around reporting, the scheduling of reports and the ability to help identify and remediate inaccurate data fields. 

More controls around security assignments

Security groups were not tightly controlled or automated, leading to increased risk and fatigue as employees were being bombarded with tasks not related to their business units. The organization needed to limit access to decrease task amounts and notification overload. This also helps confirm employees would have visibility only into tasks relevant to their role in the organization. 

Supporting HCM users

Workday users were unsure if they were performing tasks correctly or if their modules were correctly configured, which created a lack of confidence, system knowledge and productivity. The organization needed to showcase system functionality to help create more proficient users that knew how to achieve holistic value from the system. 

By leveraging its built-in solutions, such as automated documentation and reporting, templates and integrated coding, Next Level HR enabled the healthcare organization to enforce standardization and helped streamline HR processes more effectively. Key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards and Saratoga, a PwC product,  benchmarks allowed the organization’s Workday data to become more meaningful and consistent, paving the way for better decision-making and strategic planning. And because Next Level HR can run in the background — analyzing core performance competencies and highlighting how potential changes may improve KPIs organizations know how, when, and where to act.

Go further with Next Level HR 

In the ever-evolving healthcare industry, managing a workforce takes the right data, processes, and systems. But even with the right human capital management system, organizations can struggle to unlock greater value. Solutions like Next Level HR can help empower healthcare organizations to turn HCM complexities into simplified, straightforward, data-rich resources —helping you see why — and how — your HCM is affecting your business and help demonstrate the value in aligning your HCM instance with your objectives. Contact us today to learn more about how Next Level HR can help you unlock value across your HCM system.