Sid Lee Streamlines Execution of 2,000 Client Projects in Workday Financial Management With Boomi

Business Goals

Global creative services agency Sid Lee delivers innovative advertising and marketing with a 900-person team across Canada, the U.S., and Europe. Sid Lee faced an obstacle to growth in its use of different financial and professional services automation (PSA) applications to interact with and manage client projects.

The Emmy Award-winning agency needed to standardize internal and client management processes and applications to better share information across business units and countries. Sid Lee was keen to leverage cloud technology to achieve its goal.

Integration Challenges

An outdated enterprise resource planning (ERP) application and different PSA tools for client project management across business units in Canada and the U.S. meant time-consuming, error-prone manual data entry. Unintegrated systems also hindered visibility and collaboration as teams couldn’t easily track project status and client billings.

Sid Lee decided to standardize both its PSA and ERP applications across locations, selecting Workday Financial Management for the latter. The company then turned to Boomi to connect the two systems and orchestrate processes.

How Boomi Helped

With Boomi, Sid Lee automated processes at Canadian and U.S. business units:

• User creation. When employees are onboarded into Workday, a user account is automatically created in the PSA.
• Financial management. Projects created in Workday are pushed into the PSA, with Workday the system of record.
• Project structure. Data is pushed from the PSA tool into Workday Financial Management.
• Project actuals. Data for things like time and expense reports are entered into Workday and pushed to the PSA as actuals.

Results

Sid Lee can more efficiently manage 2,000 client projects across Canadian and U.S. business units, giving up to 700 PSA users 100 percent visibility into projects. With Boomi synchronizing 1,300 requests a day between Workday and the PSA, teams can monitor project status and profitability.

Ability to enter actuals directly into Workday Financial Management eliminated previous accounting problems, as data is only added to one system, and simplified project management. Building on success, Sid Lee will replicate the system in Europe.