From Vision to Impact: Celebrating Our 2025 North America Customer Award Winners

In this article we discuss:

• Global Workforce Transformation Winner: Accenture
• Powering Innovation Winner: Medical University of South Carolina
• Finance for the Future Winner: Ameriprise Financial
• Future-Ready Winner: Dow
• Rapid Time to Value Winner: Sphera

Our customers are our inspiration. All 11,000+ of them. Workday Rising gives us a chance to recognize how they collaborate, innovate, and stay at the top of their industries.

For the second year, our North America Customer Awards showcase our top performers in five key areas, honoring their incredible journeys and tangible impact. Chosen from hundreds of nominations, this year's winners exemplify resilience, adaptability, and vision in a world of constant change.

Let's take a closer look at our 2025 North America Customer Award winners.

• Global Workplace Transformation: This professional services powerhouse used Workday to uplevel processes, drive productivity higher, and promote its agile workforce around the world.

• Powering Innovation: This academic medical center used Workday and its AI capabilities in new ways to scale its scope and operations.

• Finance for the Future: Flexibility in finance is rare, but this winner took a static system and made it dynamic with deep insights into its business that are already driving growth.

• Rapid Time to Value: Fast self-deployment? Check. AI adoption? Check again. This customer saved hundreds of hours of admin and manual work.

• Future-Ready: It's the year for skills transformation and this customer went all in, transforming its global HR approach to prep its people for careers today and tomorrow.

Chosen from hundreds of nominations across industries and regions, this year's winners exemplify resilience, adaptability, and vision in today's rapidly evolving world of work.

Our panel of judges included Workday leaders, customers, and industry analysts who faced a tough challenge to select these standouts.

Global Workforce Transformation: Accenture

The Challenge

With 800K+ employees, global professional services giant Accenture struggled with a fragmented, manual access management process that lacked real-time visibility, affecting compliance and user experience.

The Solution

The Accenture team used Workday Extend to build a Security Hub to centralize and automate access requests, approvals, and revocations. They drove smooth adoption with a phased rollout, change management, and targeted training for employees to use the app.

In just six months, Accenture boosted employee-initiated access requests from 20% to 61%, with a 99.85% success rate and 15% of requests resulting in immediate revocation. On the operations side, the bulk and self-service functionality saved 15 minutes per request, adding up to over 15,000 hours annually.

Key Innovation

Accenture's combined use of Workday Extend and generative AI powered massive improvements in efficiency and service through replacing manual processes with intelligent, real-time automation. With compliance embedded into the platform, employees gain greater self-service control without increasing security risk.

Accenture is developing an AI-enabled segregated duties matrix and advanced audit capabilities that will improve risk management and compliance. Today, Accenture's blend of automation, AI, and real-time governance is fundamentally reshaping their enterprise security and delivering efficiency, accuracy, and user empowerment at scale.

Powering Innovation: Medical University of South Carolina

The Challenge

After consolidating over 60 legacy systems into Workday, the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) faced challenges with user adoption and manual processes for tasks like analyzing new hire survey data and urgent recruiting communication.

The Solution

MUSC launched a multi-pronged initiative to embed support and automation directly within Workday. They deployed on-demand guidance, used Workday Messaging for instant SMS outreach, and leveraged Workday Prism to integrate feedback with core HR data for powerful new dashboards.

To accelerate communication, MUSC deployed Workday Messaging for instant SMS outreach to candidates and internal leaders. They also automated survey analysis by using Workday Prism to integrate feedback with core HR data, creating powerful new compliance and analysis dashboards. Workday Assistant has been a huge game changer for casual users, especially because it's accessible within Teams. MUSC now uses AI to risk rate expense types on emergency room and expense receipt scanning. They do this via the mobile app. Leveraging Workday AI capabilities, MUSC simplified and enhanced user experience, and earned a quick ROI.

Key Innovation

MUSC's innovation lies in its shift from passive training and manual processes to a real-time, integrated support model. And they've committed to turn on every single AI feature available since 2023. This holistic approach empowers employees to be more self-sufficient, automates critical workflows, and transforms raw data into strategic insights.

Finance for the Future: Ameriprise Financial

The Challenge

Ameriprise Financial faced significant gaps in its Workday Allocations system that slowed operations and increased audit risk. They needed a more flexible and dynamic system to handle complex financial processes.

The Solution

Ameriprise engineered a powerful allocations subsystem using Workday Prism and Workday Extend to handle complex back-end logic and calculations. This eliminated over 800 allocation rules and 21,000 manual journal entries each year, saving countless hours and accelerating month-end close.

Embedding transfer pricing logic aligned with both OECD and local tax standards helped Ameriprise manage compliance more effectively. Also, it can automatically generate invoice documentation required for VAT/GST reporting and supports SOX requirements, reducing risk and audit complexity.

Workday Extend provided a user-friendly configuration interface for business teams. This entire solution is designed to be scalable for global environments, supporting diverse tax, currency, and entity structures while empowering leadership with timely data for pricing decisions.

Key Innovation

Instead of rigid or disconnected financial processes, the company now has a framework that is flexible, governed, and scalable.

Extend helps manage configurations, while Prism powers heavy-duty logic, data manipulation, and advanced allocation rules. Workday Financial and Direct Intercompany functionality continue to handle accounting and intercompany processing and authors digital invoices. Together, these elements function as one seamless solution for finance, yet remain modular and synchronized behind the scenes.

The impact has been profound: Ameriprise can now manage accurate, compliant intercompany activity across currencies and jurisdictions while reducing manual touchpoints. Leaders describe it as a "step-change," transforming allocations and intercompany processes into a dynamic platform where finance leads innovation and growth.

Future-Ready: Dow

The Challenge

Dow, a global materials science company, faced fragmented talent processes and limited visibility into workforce capabilities, making it difficult to assess current skill strengths and plan effectively for future needs. These challenges stood in the way of building a more agile, skills-based workforce.

The Solution

Dow adopted Workday as the foundation for their complete skills transformation, using it to build a customized and strategically aligned global skills framework mapped to 3,500+ job-specific skills and covering 95% of their headcount.

By activating Workday Skills Cloud, Career Hub, and mentor-matching, Dow saw a 54% increase in employee engagement, with 83% of employees expressing confidence in using the tools to plan their careers. The effort boosted engagement with key professional development content provider, Coursera, by 165% and drove 7,437 new enrollments in six months. Learning content efficiency improved by 70% and saved 187 training hours.

Key Innovation

Dow's skills transformation has reshaped how talent is identified, developed, and mobilized across the organization. Powered by Workday, the company built a global skills framework tailored to its workforce, drawing on both internal insights and market data to ensure relevance and impact.

This initiative sparked a cultural shift, giving Dow a scalable and sustainable model for skills development. Employees now have the tools and confidence to take ownership of their career paths, with one leader noting, "This is the most connected I've felt to my career path in years."

Rapid Time to Value: Sphera

The Challenge

Sustainability and operational risk management software leader Sphera had previously implemented a customer service platform for HR ticketing to consolidate email addresses and improve support. But while the change simplified the experience in some ways, it didn't move the needle far enough on quality or efficiency.

HR teams were spending too much time fielding repetitive questions and Sphera colleagues still relied heavily on tickets instead of self-service, which limited productivity and slowed resolution times.

The Solution

Sphera added Workday Help to replace their previous tool and self-deployed it in under 60 days. With more than 150 articles published, they now leverage Workday's AI writing capabilities alongside Workday Assistant and have realized a 45% reduction of year-over-year ticket volume.

The transformation saved Sphera teams hundreds of hours in 2024 alone and received praise from leaders across business functions.

Key Innovation

By making Workday Help the single entry point for HR support, Sphera accelerated adoption of self-service and enabled HR teams to focus on partnering strategically with leaders across the business rather than remaining bogged down in immediate support requests. They were able to transform HR access and support levels without excessive overhead or deployment time, and they completely unified the experience across channels including web, mobile, and Microsoft Teams.

Congratulations to Our Winners

It's always so inspiring to hear these stories firsthand. Each one is a living example of how our customers are turning vision into real-world impact. From transforming finance to reimagining workforce skills, these organizations are truly leading the way.

To our forward-thinking award winners-congratulations! And to our entire community, thank you for your partnership and for continuing to show us what's possible when we build the future together.

Learn more about the North America Customer Award Winners.