The University of Queensland is one of the top fifty universities in the world. We're based in Australia, in Brisbane, but we have students that come from all over the world to study. We've got about 56,000 students and we've got about 20,000 staff as well. I'm the chief HR Officer, so I’ve got responsibility for all of the HR Function for across the university.

The international student market has been heavily disrupted during the last few years with the pandemic, we're getting back to campus, which is being really exciting. But of course, we're also looking at the online shift to learning and how that interacts with the on-campus experience that students are also expecting. Prior to going live with Workday, we had hundreds of different ways of doing things across the university and putting that all now into one system, into Workday has really helped us to have standardization Workday is a system and a solution that I think really does help to standardize all of the processes.

And we've really found that Workday helped us to drive a significant transformation not just for HR, but also about how our employees engage with each other and across the university.

We looked across a number of different partners. We felt that KPMG really had a partnership, and we really did feel that the partnership was there from the start. We needed to have some specific higher education knowledge and KPMG were able to access that from a global firm, and that was the sort of the partnership that we wanted was to know that our specific solution would be able to be met with the resources that KPMG could offer.

There's a number of benefits that we've seen. The first is that we've had significant transformation of our human resources function. So, a lot of the processes are now best in practice, best in class. We've certainly seen that. We've had a lot more standardization across the university. One of the things that we've been able to do now is to be able to access data that previously we weren't able to access.

Really diving deeply to what's happening across the university and that's a really big improvement from what we had. Also, everything is in one system. So, when we need to follow up on supervisors or people that are required to do approvals, we now and you have to go into one system and that was something that previously took a lot of resources, a lot of time and effort.

We're also finding that we've started the continual improvement journey. So even since going live a year ago, we've made significant continual adjustments and improvements to the system to really make sure that we're meeting the end user’s needs. We're working with KPMG to implement the next modules of workday. We're looking at advanced talent and advanced compensation, so we're looking to do talent management, succession planning, advanced compensation, which is more around bonus and increases.

And that's a really exciting journey for us and something that the university hasn't done a lot in the past. In Australia we have the Australian HR Awards, and the University of Queensland just was announced that we had won that award for 2022 and that was really for the implementation that we've just undertaken with Workday. So that's great recognition, you know, within an Australian market of the significance of this project.