Collectors
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About the Client |
| Industry Collectibles Grading and Authentication |
Employees 1000+ |
Collectors is the global leader in authentication and management of collectibles, with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and Paris. Collectors provides hobbyists and alternative asset investors with best-in-class products, tools and services that power the collectibles industry. Collectors brands include leading authentication and grading services PSA (trading cards and memorabilia), PCGS (coins and currency), and WATA (video games and pop culture), as well as online collectibles marketplace, Goldin. Visit Collectors.com to learn more.
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The Challenge |
- Collectors, while quickly growing, is still functioning lean from an operational perspective. The company made the decision to move from paper-based HR and Talent processes and tracking to implementing a number of new systems including Workday for its HRIS. With this decision, the organization faced the challenge of staffing a Workday Launch Implementation project team with stakeholders that, while highly capable in their roles, were unfamiliar with systems-based processes, how to approach implementing a cloud-based enterprise application, and the many common challenges of the rapid-paced Workday Launch Implementation approach.
- The Collectors team was not experienced in the nuances of Workday, how to translate their requirements into Workday terms, designing solutions to take advantage of Workday’s capabilities, nor asking the right questions during implementation to ensure success at and beyond Go-Live.
- The Collectors team experienced another common challenge of the Workday Launch approach: the expectation of a rapid turnaround on client-owned deliverables right from the onset of the project. The team needed support in immediately owning data gathering and population of unfamiliar data workbooks, as well as aligning their requirements with an unfamiliar new system.
- Due to the short Workday Launch implementation timeline, Collectors faced challenges getting integrations vendors aligned in time to meet the project’s targeted Go Live date. Collectors needed enough time to finalize Integrations requirements, plan for and execute Testing, and feel confident that integrations with their external systems would be ready on-time.
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The Solution |
Collectors engaged Kognitiv to take advantage of Workday Project Management and Advisory Services, adding a client-side project manager, an integration advisory consultant, and an HCM advisory consultant.
- Kognitiv Project Managers have experience and expertise in supporting clients on the Launch Implementation methodology. The Kognitiv Project Manager ensured the Collectors project team had sufficient knowledge and awareness of the timeline and understood the expectations during each phase of the project.
- The Kognitiv Integrations consultant worked with the Collectors team and their vendor partners to quickly turn around requirements, call out anticipated issues and resolve them early while helping plan and execute mitigations for integration workstreams that were at-risk due to the very quick Launch Implementation timeline. Kognitiv’s Integrations consultant also helped the Collectors team prepare and execute a robust testing strategy for their key integrations and brought significant experience implementing those same Workday Integrations numerous times before to compose a thorough list of Test Scenarios for the team to execute.
- The Kognitiv Solutions Architect came up to speed on the business’s requirements quickly and lent his significant Workday Functional Area knowledge to the Collectors team to guide them through Requirements sessions, Prototype Review, and Testing preparation and execution to ensure all partner-delivered configurations met those requirements.
- Along the way, Kognitiv’s Solutions Architect advised the client team and implementation partner on best practices for implementing solutions in Workday that would align with Collector’s needs, and even owned the configuration of many essential Workday elements that were out-of-scope for the implementation partner–ensuring that all critical business requirements were met before Go-Live and no key Workday functionality had to be deferred to a later phase.
“We went with Kognitiv due to the flexibility of their services. We knew we needed support in project management, integrations and solutions architecture, but didn’t want to engage multiple consultants. Kognitiv allowed us to pull in various experts as needed, ensuring we received all the support we needed without the overhead.
“Since Kognitiv specializes in post go-live support, they were able to help us avoid common pitfalls during implementation that would have resulted in more work down the line.
“We knew our implementation would be a challenge given the quick launch timeline and our lean internal team without an HRIS Manager. While other consultancies we considered were focused on the risks, Kognitiv had a flexible and solutions-oriented approach that left us confident we’d be able to hit our go-live target.”
-Rachel Rose,
Director of Talent Acquisition Programs and Operations
