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Case Study: A Health System Mid Acquisition

By Aurelian Advisory Group · August 2026

A large healthcare system, mid acquisition of several hospital groups, was ready to implement Workday HCM, Finance, and Supply Chain across every new entity. One question before the work began changed the entire shape of the engagement.

Client situation and program scale

A large healthcare system in the middle of acquiring several hospital groups was planning to implement Workday HCM, Finance, and Supply Chain, with the goal of centralizing operations across every new acquisition and finally moving off paper.

Stage the program was at when Aurelian engaged

Before the program had touched a single system. The CFO, CIO, CHRO, and delivery lead brought Ronald in during initial scoping, on the strength of his experience leading transformations like this one. The early conversation covered goals, what success looked like, and the timeline. It was a genuinely good conversation, until one question changed the shape of the engagement.

Risks discovered

Before agreeing to help, Ronald asks every organization the same question: "What does your data look like?" This time, the room went quiet. The CIO finally said, "It's bad." The CHRO explained why: the data was not accurate, it was spread across five different systems, some of it existed only on paper, and in some cases, no one in the room could say where it actually was.

"It's not accurate. Some of it's in five different systems. Some of it's on paper. And some of it, I don't actually know where it is."

Aurelian's intervention and recommendation

Ronald was direct: clean the data before touching anything else. Data is the number one reason these implementations fail, not the software, not the timeline. The best plan in the world will not survive bad data at cutover.

Decisions the client changed as a result

The organization prioritized data readiness ahead of build. They ran structured campaigns to employees and vendors to source accurate data at the source, and brought in a dedicated data conversion firm to handle extraction and loading at the volume the program required. It was unglamorous work that never showed up on the project timeline as its own milestone, but it determined whether every later milestone would mean anything.

Measurable outcome

By the time testing began, it ran against real, accurate data. Compliance reports were accurate. Regulatory filings were accurate. Financial and HR audits came back clean. None of that happens if the question at the start gets skipped.

This is one reason Data Readiness is weighted as heavily as it is within the Transformation Assurance Index. It is not theory. It is the difference between a transformation that lands and one that does not.

Get in touch if you want to talk through how this applies to a program you are carrying.