About Us
Meet the Founders
Athru was founded by James McLernon and Jamie O’Reilly following a shared realisation.
After stepping away from senior roles within two of Europe’s largest Workday practices and moving into independent delivery, both experienced first-hand what it meant to sit on the client side of complex Workday programmes. The gap between delivery ambition and delivery reality was clear.
Through regular conversations, often over coffee, a vision emerged: a consultancy built around senior expertise, straightforward delivery, and genuine partnership.
From the outset, Athru was designed not only to simplify Workday delivery, but to modernise it. By combining deep functional expertise with AI-driven tooling and automation, Athru helps finance teams accelerate deployment, improve governance visibility, and unlock better decision-making from their Workday investment.
Athru was created to make Workday delivery simpler, more transparent, and more effective - with technology working for the programme, not complicating it.
James McLernon Co-Founder
James is a senior Workday Financials specialist and programme leader with nearly 10 years’ experience delivering complex finance transformations across EMEA. He works closely with CFOs, programme sponsors, and executive stakeholders to lead structured, outcome-focused Workday programmes from mobilisation through to optimisation.
Before co-founding Athru, James served as EMEA Workday Financials Practice Lead at Alight Solutions, where he oversaw regional delivery, practice strategy, and senior client engagement across multiple concurrent programmes. He has led initial implementations, multi-country rollouts, Phase X deployments, and post-production optimisation initiatives for organisations ranging from mid-market businesses to global enterprises.
James combines hands-on functional depth with strong governance and stakeholder leadership expertise. He is particularly experienced in programme mobilisation, delivery assurance, and bridging the gap between finance leadership and implementation teams to ensure clarity, control, and long-term value.
At Athru, James focuses on programme leadership, strategic advisory, and ensuring clients realise measurable outcomes from their Workday Financials investment.
Jamie O'Reilly Co-Founder
Jamie is a senior Workday solution architect with over 11 years’ experience in the Workday ecosystem, specialising in complex Workday Financials, Prism Analytics, and Accounting Center implementations. He is known for combining deep technical expertise with pragmatic, commercially grounded solution design.
Over the past eight years, Jamie has focused primarily on Workday Financials and advanced finance architecture, leading global multi-country implementations, Phase X deployments, and complex post-go-live optimisation initiatives. His work often involves designing scalable data and accounting frameworks across multi-entity and multi-currency environments.
Prior to co-founding Athru, Jamie held senior consulting and capability leadership roles within leading Workday partners, including progressing to Solution Architect and UK & Ireland Capability Lead at Kainos. He has worked closely with CFOs and Finance Directors to shape early-stage solution design, deployment strategy, and programme approach.
More recently, Jamie has supported global Workday customers independently, helping organisations maximise value through architectural clarity, targeted optimisation, and knowledge transfer.
At Athru, Jamie leads solution architecture and complex finance design, ensuring clients implement scalable, future-proof Workday solutions aligned to long-term business objectives.
Who We Are
Athru is an Irish word meaning change or transformation.
It reflects our belief that meaningful change in finance doesn’t come from technology alone, but from how organisations rethink the role of finance itself - moving from reporting the past to shaping the future.
At Athru, we partner with CFOs and finance leaders to drive that transformation. As Workday Finance Advisors, we help organisations get the most from their Workday investment - not just implementing systems, but enabling better decisions, stronger controls, and greater agility across the Office of the CFO.
Ready to Transform?
We combine deep Workday Financials expertise with a native AI mindset, helping finance teams harness automation, data, and insight to reduce complexity and focus on what matters most. From record-to-report to planning, forecasting, and analytics, our focus is on building modern finance functions that are scalable, intelligent, and future-ready.
Athru is about change done properly - practical, sustainable, and aligned to the realities of today’s finance teams. It’s transformation that goes through finance, not around it.