Synergy Group welcomes senior Workday team ahead of government ERP overhaul
Synergy Group has made four senior additions to its enterprise resource planning team in Sydney and Perth – Duane Goff, Eva Bellaire, Giles Wei and Prad Prabhakar.
Focused on the Workday platform, Bellaire joins Synergy Group from Deloitte alongside fellow partner recruit and former Collaborative Solutions colleague Goff, while Wei and Prabhakar come on board as executive directors via its parent Cognizant.
Synergy has partnered with Workday, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform covering finance, human resources management, payroll and planning, with a view to the major overhaul of government ERP systems on the horizon.
“Synergy has been providing ERP strategic advice and implementation services to federal government agencies for more than 25 years,” the firm states. “Over this time, we have developed an in-depth understanding of the business and technical ERP requirements of agencies, from very large portfolios through to micro-operations.”
Further noting its experience with the strengths and weaknesses of other currently-available platforms, the firm adds; “We see there is a strong requirement for additional competition in the market from a reputable, proven vendor that can provide a modern, fully integrated ERP solution that operates in the cloud as a true native software as a service (SaaS) model.”
To that end, Synergy has recruited a team of experienced Workday advisors and technicians who had previously worked together at one of the world’s largest specialist Workday consultancies, Collaborative Solutions, which was bought by Cognizant in mid-2020.
Based out of Sydney, Goff most recently served as Collaborative Solutions’ regional vice president, having joined the consultancy in 2019 upon the purchase of his locally co-founded specialist Theory of Mind. Earlier, Goff had co-founded Red Rock Consulting, an Oracle specialist which was acquired by DXC Technology in 2019.
Tracing their paths back to Theory of Mind, Prabhakar, a consulting services director, and Wei, a senior functional architect, join Synergy directly from Cognizant, while Perth-based Bellaire with an earlier workforce software background was Collaborative Solutions’ Asia Pacific vice president of delivery before departing in 2023 to join the partnership of Deloitte.
The quartet follow Annie McCulloch, who joined in Canberra earlier this year as Workday business development partner from Ernst & Young, where she was an associate partner and had spent a decade and a half across two stints, split by time as a government-focused account executive at Workday itself. Existing partner Mandy Hill, has also now shifted into a federal government ERP role.
The government’s ERP journey
Following last year’s cancellation of the GovERP program, Synergy is gearing up for what it describes as a once-in-a-quarter-century transformation of the federal government’s core ERP systems that underpin the operations of every agency, with major, long-lasting investment decisions now having to be made on replacements and upgrades over the next twelve to eighteen months.
Writing previously in the Mandarin, Synergy CEO Robert Kennedy said; “We have worked in CFO functions across federal government agencies for close to three decades and felt first-hand the impacts of poor ERP implementations. The effort to meet even core compliance requirements, let alone provide value-add strategic insights, has made it increasingly difficult to provide timely information to support decision-making.”
