Item: Workday Adaptive Planning
Rating: 8
Author: Manas Singh

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Workday Adaptive Planning is used for Financial Planning and Reporting activities. Workday Adaptive Planning is being used across the whole organization . Every cost center manager prepares an annual plan within Adaptive Planning.The FP&A team is the primary editor of information, but read-only information is widely consumed across the org. It helps in dynamic planning through collaboration across the team during planning. Adaptive Planning is also valuable for forecasting.

Pros and Cons

Eliminates the need for Spreadsheet with far better collaborative feature
Excellent User interface and ease of usage.
Great analytics and charting. It stores historical information and is valuable for forecasting and comparing with historical data.
Excellent tool to create dynamic models for budgets and forecasts that can connect directly to financials.
Trend Analysis

This being a SAAS Solution , sometimes the models are slow to update and load
The search functionality can be improved with some user friendly tutorials.
Not sure if it supports shortcuts like Excel. Seasoned excel users would like to have similar shortcuts.
Documentation and training can be improved , specifically around creation of complex models and integration with other tools.

Return on Investment

Helped in dynamic planning with teams collaboration
It helped optimized the process around planning across the organization's teams.

Workday Adaptive Planning Data Driven

We already have Workday in the organization and integration of adaptive planning helped improve the over all experience of doing financial planning and forecasting. It helped us in streamlining our planning process and improved the reporting and SLAs.

Usability

Ease of use and to get self started with little or no training. Intuitive GUI

Alternatives Considered

Anaplan and IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson

I wasnot responsible for choosing the financial planning tool.

Key Insights

Do you think Workday Adaptive Planning delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Workday Adaptive Planning's feature set?

Yes

Did Workday Adaptive Planning live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Workday Adaptive Planning go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Workday Adaptive Planning again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Adaptive Planning is user friendly and the screens are easy to navigate. It doesnt take much time or training to get started. Its ability to model and budget off KPIs and build department-specific budgets is very useful. It's relatively easy to add new models or forecasts to the instance. The workflow planning allows you to assign specific tasks to different users to keep track of your overall budgeting cycles. Version control is a big advantage compared to the excel sheet.
As the system grows, sometime the time to load and update model increases. There is room for improvement on customization of reports.

Workday Adaptive Planning at a glance

Overall Satisfaction with Workday Adaptive Planning