Jedox is a Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management solution. According to the vendor, their solution’s unified planning, analysis and reporting empowers decision makers from finance, sales, purchasing and marketing. Additionally, the vendor says this solution helps business users work smarter, streamline business collaboration, and make insight-based decisions with confidence. The vendor also says 1,900 organizations in 127 countries are using Jedox for real-time planning…
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Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 7.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.
Best suited for financial consolidation and / or as a highly customized and compact EPM / BI solution (up to 100 CCU) with individual workflows, planning and reporting functionalities, with moderate number of users (no restrictions for any industry, all industries are covered well). It also has advanced reporting & data analysis requirements and provides an integration and reporting layer of imported data from different external systems (via ETL). It can help with migrating your legacy Excel-based business models to the Web. It is not well suited for Enterprise BI applications with expecting >500 CCU (users at the same time working with the system) - this may cause serious performance issues, as all data is kept in RAM. Jedox is also less suited for applications with heavy document management requirements (document management is not an out of the box functionality in Jedox and rather requires custom development through custom widgets etc.).
It can be best suited in scenarios which require multi dimensional modelling and reporting and more simpler and granular metrics need to be tracked. It also helps assess various what if scenarios to evaluate scope of business opportunities and help stakeholders take business decisions. One can create plans aligned with various organizational and business unit goals by collaborating with all kinds of department and users in organization.
Version Management. Adaptive lets us manage many versions/scenarios all in one platform with the robust ability to compare them to each other.
Processing Performance. With the Elastic Hypercube technology that was implemented a few years back, we can watch changes flow through a complex web of formulas and arrive at an answer within seconds.
Audit Trail. Our administrators love the ability to see and report on who made what changes when, which leads to real accountability within the organization.
Diversity. Jedox can be applied to many different use cases from small to large deployments and from budgeting to enterprise class BI solutions. But rarely is one tool able to fulfill all of these requirements in one organisation. This value proposition can be complicated for prospective users.
Awareness. Jedox punches above its weight in capability and scalability, but not enough people have heard about it and therefore procurement processes can be drawn out as a result.
It would be beneficial to me, as a user, if there was a library of documentation for every type of feature. This could be something regarding formula building, understanding how attributes work, with examples, or a location for basic and advance documentation on Sheet/Model/Cubes.
I would like to have the ability to directly assign some dimensions to accounts easier. A drag and drop feature for that would be interesting. This has been a challenge for me when new dimensions are built and I am unable to assign them to new accounts.
I would also like to see some more formulas or an easier way to do some basic tasks. For example a simple YTD function instead of running a simple, yet long string of texts for the formulas. Or the option for selecting YTD features, removing the need of the formula all together.
For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.
To me Jedox deserves 10/10 because it is a consistent one-in-all platform with a modern look and feel. It is intuitive to use and allows you to make intuitive applications integrating traditional business intelligence with performance management functionality. It certainly has a short learning curve, especially for those that are familiar with MS Excel. An example: I've lost count but Jedox it is available in more than 25 languages. Another: Jedox does not require programming skills... it is developed to be used by the business.
Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.
Jedox has very few bugs. Reports are available through an Excel add-in, the web and/or mobile device (IOS/Android). In my opinion, availability also means high performance, not having to wait for the system to give you the required reports, analysis, dashboards instantly.
There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.
All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.
Jedox support in general is a professional and fast responding team. An easy-to-use ticketing system is in place. Bug-related questions are solved fast (responses come usually in a few hours after the question), but some questions / tickets, that are not Jedox-related bugs (for example some advanced questions about Jedox functionality), may be forwarded to Application Management team for further processing and then it may take several days or even weeks to get a response here -> there is room for improvement here.
Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.
This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.
They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.
The implementation of SSO, SAML Authentication, HTTPS, Server splitting (Frontend / Backend servers) could be more standardized and made more user friendly to set up (e.g. via setup guide). Otherwise the implementation of Jedox is quick and simple when compared to other similar technologies.
Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.
Calumo is similar product to Jedox. I have used it extensively in my previous role. It was a major contender when we evaluated a BI platform for NIDA. Calumo is a great product as well and it was a very close call. Where we found Jedox to be a better fit for NIDA was the ability to prepare dynamic reports with ease without the need to learn MDX which was used extensively by Calumo to make dynamic reports which expand or shrink based on the underlying data. Another major benefit we saw in Jedox was the whole ETL process could be managed within Jedox instead of doing it in SQL server which negates having a dedicated SQL specialist role when the scale expands.
Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.
Scalability is often another word for speed. Given enough data, enough users or enough calculations, the tool becomes slower and slower. You will find that Jedox has a very high performance that can even be increased by the use of grafical cards. Other thaen that it does not only offer BI (looking back based on historical ERP data) but also allows you to look forward through integrated budgetting, planning, forecasting, workflow and collaboration. Not easy to find a tool that can support so much business functionality. So, also pretty scalable in that respect.
We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale
Financial budgeting and Forecasting are done in a centralized fashion in Jedox now instead of a decentralized excel based approach. A lot of cost savings and improved reliability
Easy to use self-help Dashboards and detailed reports
Adaptive has had a very positive impact on our planning process by providing the ability to collaborate and has reduced the inevitable errors encountered with our other budgeting tool.
Our ROI is proving out exponentially with the increased efficiencies gained, time saved from streamlining of our processes, and the overall enhancement with staff communication throughout the budget cycle.
