For the 117th episode of Burning Platform, we host Patrice Cappello, Managing Director of the Professional and Business Services vertical at Workday.
She has been focused on deploying technology to drive business outcomes in this sector for 25 years. She is a true student of the industry, having seen it evolve over time.
We start with a discussion on our wide service-based economy and Workday’s target markets in that sector. This includes organizations where people are driving the revenue: management & IT consulting, accounting, marketing services, business process outsourcing, and staffing firms among others.
We discuss the Workday feature set for this vertical. The professional services automation (PSA) category is well-trodden and covers project management and accounting, resource management, time sheet analysis among other functionality. Their services-focused configure price quote (CPQ) capabilities increasingly differentiate Workday from other PSA vendors.
She talks about how her customers are using Workday Extend to solve for unique business challenges. One company enhanced their “proposal engines” by facilitating inclusion of CVs of proposed staffing. It is common in the sector to shuffle proposed staff rather than keep them on the bench and that often takes plenty of manual effort to revise proposals.
She covers the launch of their Professional and Business Services Innovation Awards (last year the awards were announced at their Rising user conference), and discusses one of the winners, CrossVue, which created individual dashboards for billable workers.
We discuss, of course, AI and how Workday is developing use cases specific to her vertical, especially those related to resource management. As she says they are bringing “all the dimensions of data that they have to factor in to put together a perfect team for delivery for a customer.”
Very nicely done in 25 minutes by a seasoned veteran of the sector.
