Workday system goes live at Northwest, enhancing payroll, other business processes

At exactly midnight this morning, Kurt Porterfield swiped his Bearcat Card at a kiosk in Northwest Missouri State University’s Facility Services Building and logged his start time as a third-shift custodian on the campus. By doing so, he became the first Northwest employee to use Workday, a software system that will revolutionize business processes and transactions at the University.

Kurt Porterfield, a third-shift custodian, swiped his Bearcat Card at midnight Monday, becoming the first Northwest employee to enter the start of his work time through Workday, a software system the University is implementing. (Northwest Missouri State University photo)

Staff members from Northwest’s finance and human resources offices joined the third-shift employees, waving green poms and shooting small streamer cannons to celebrate the milestone as the remaining Facility Services employees swiped their cards.

Within a couple of minutes, all 12 of the Facility Services employees beginning their shift had logged into the system – immediately doing away with the paper sign-in sheet that they had used for decades.

“It is truly transformational,” Mary Collins, Northwest’s assistant vice president of finance and controller, said. “It is really exciting to finally be able to use technology and use it to our advantage to help with all of the paperwork and all the manual-ness that goes on (at Northwest).”

Now, all of Northwest’s 700-plus employees can record their work hours simply by logging into the system on a computer, through a smartphone app or by swiping their Bearcat Card as Porterfield did.

As part of the transition to Workday, Northwest also is moving from a monthly pay cycle to a biweekly one that will provide employees with more timely and accurate wages, including overtime, leave hours and other salary adjustments.  

“For an employee to be able to see ‘These are the hours I worked, and these are the overtime hours I worked, or the vacation I took, and it’s going to be in the next paycheck,’ it makes so much more sense,” Collins said. “We went down a path to truly align it with our work week so that it would visually make sense. It’s the first time we’ve ever had a system that sums up the hours for the employee, and it’s going to be right there for them, so we’re just super excited about a lot of the functionality on Workday.”

Since last fall, Northwest teams have spent innumerable hours analyzing Northwest’s current system configurations, discussing pain points in University systems and testing core processes and reports in Workday to ensure smooth implementation. In addition to payroll, the Workday system enhances operations in areas such as hiring, expense management and purchasing.

While Monday morning marked the culmination of implementing the Workday system for its professional employees, the University is now embarking on its work to test and deploy the platform for Northwest students.

Once fully implemented in 2028, Workday will replace fragmented systems at Northwest and reduce manual processes, giving the University modern tools for budget management, hiring and onboarding, payroll and benefits, timesheets and leave balances, updating personal information as well as student information system functionality. 

For more information and updates about Northwest’s Workday implementation, visit www.nwmissouri.edu/services/workday.