Floyd Walterhouse has worked at McKee Foods for nearly 48 years. He was there when they used time clocks that documented hours on rolls of paper tape. He was there when they moved to a Unisys mainframe, when they implemented PeopleSoft, when Oracle acquired PeopleSoft. And he was there when McKee signed a contract with a company called Workday.
He is still there now as an application systems manager. And what has kept him, through every platform and every era, is a conviction he traces back to a professor he worked for decades ago: Don’t fall in love with technology. Fall in love with what you can do with it to make a meaningful difference in the lives of others.
The story of how he learned that starts well before McKee.
Before the Code
Walterhouse grew up in small-town Tennessee, the kind of place where you knew most people and most people knew you. After attending boarding school, he spent a year in Central America on a privately funded humanitarian project, helping build a hospital on the border of Belize and Guatemala. Then he came home, started college, and—after a good pitch from a professor—dived into studying psychology. Two years in, however, a field trip to the psych ward at Erlanger hospital gave him a much-needed reality check.
He switched to computer science.
At the time, a four-year degree in the field didn’t exist. Walterhouse finished a two-year program and briefly went to work for the professor who’d recruited him. After that, he took a job at McKee Foods, where he’d already done contract work.
He has been there ever since.
Growing Up With Workday
When McKee started looking at what was available on the market, they became an early PeopleSoft customer. They stayed on it through the Oracle acquisition, watching the roadmap go quiet, and started wondering what came next. Walterhouse found a website called davesnextmove.com—a placeholder registered by PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield, who most people in the industry suspected wasn’t finished yet. He brought it to the leadership team, and McKee decided to take the leap.
The message that came back changed things. McKee signed with Workday in December 2006 as their seventh customer, at a time when the platform had only one live deployment. What made the decision easier wasn’t that Workday was proven—it wasn’t. It was that they knew Dave, knew his philosophy, and recognized most of the team. It felt less like switching vendors and more like continuing a relationship.
From the start, McKee understood the arrangement that way. “We weren’t just signing a contract with a vendor,” Walterhouse says. “We were joining a partnership.” The McKee team committed to keeping their eyes open, passing feedback, and helping shape what the platform became, including pushing back on Workday’s early plan to leave payroll to ADP. McKee didn’t want that. Workday listened, and asked if McKee would serve as design partners for U.S. payroll instead.
