Understanding Availability of Consulting Resources is Critical in Workday ERP Implementation Plan, Says Zafar Chaudry, MD, SVP, Chief Digital & Information Officer, Seattle Children’s

Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Dr. Zafar Chaudry, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital and Information Officer at Seattle Children’s. In this conversation, we dive into Seattle Children’s journey to modernize their ERP system, exploring the rationale behind this transformation, the decision-making process that led to choosing Workday, and the unique strategies employed to optimize both internal and external resources. Dr. Chaudry shares his insights on navigating complex implementations, fostering collaboration across departments, and balancing the needs of the organization with a commitment to efficient, patient-centered care. We also discuss the importance of acknowledging and compensating internal teams fairly, ensuring the success of major projects while maintaining a culture of recognition and respect.

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Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Dr. Zafar Chaudry, SVP, Chief Digital and Info­­­­­­­­rmation Officer with Seattle Children’s. I’m Anthony Guerra, founder and editor in chief. Dr. Chaudry, thanks for joining me.

Dr. Chaudry: Thanks for having me.

Anthony: Please tell me a little bit about your organization and your role.

Dr. Chaudry: Seattle Children’s Pediatric Health System is in the Pacific Northwest. We serve Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. I’m the Chief Digital Officer and CIO, and I’ve been with Seattle Children’s for seven years. I lead a team of 485 energized people, delivering everything from infrastructure to analytics to digital health.

Anthony: Great. Today we’re going to focus on ERP. You posted on LinkedIn about finishing phase one of the Workday implementation. One of the things you mentioned was you wanted the employees of Seattle Children’s to have more of a modern experience dealing with things like HR and payroll.  We could start with the genesis of this project. Tell me how something like this comes about, bubbles to the surface, and ultimately becomes identified as a major, major project that the organization is going undertake.

Dr. Chaudry: Part of our discussions at Seattle Children’s were centered around our new strategic plan. And in our new strategic plan, we decided that we needed to have seamless operations. And part of having seamless operations is looking at the key systems you have in your organization and then determining whether those systems are modern enough to do the functions that people expect them to do. We started our journey a few years back with replacing our EMR because that is one of our core fundamental systems; and we identified that the ERP was the second core fundamental system that you needed to effectively run a healthcare organization. We finished the EMR work and then we looked at the ERP. We had been using in Infor Lawson for 15-plus years, but what we hadn’t done was bring the experience to where our internal customers, our doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, non-clinicians needed to use those tools.  For instance whether or not we could use those tools in the mobility space, as well as have user interface and ease of use that brought us into the new century, as they say.

These are really big projects. We stacked them one after the other.  Workday was selected through an RFP process, and we looked at all the usual suspects in this space – Infor, Oracle, and Workday. Workday was selected by a group of key individuals in our organization that represented people and culture, supply chain, finance, and payroll.