The SAP BPC software is designed to help users plan and achieve a faster, more accurate close. The SAP BPC software aims to help users spend more time growing their business and less time closing books. The vendor’s value proposition is that their software delivers planning, budgeting, forecasting, and financial consolidation capabilities in a single application. This, in turn, enables them to easily adjust plans and forecasts, speed up budget and closing cycles, and ensure compliance with…
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Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 8.0 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.
Chose SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
SAP BPC was decided to be implemented into our company due to the added value compared to other competitors who offer the same systems. Although SAP BPC has room for improvement, the ease of use was the deciding factor that resulted in the company picking it. Organization, …
Chose SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)
We plan to move to a web-based tool within the next two years. Workday is building a planning model within their finance tool, which we are evaluating, and we are looking at other tools such as Adaptive and Tidemark as alternative platforms. We expect to need some …
SAP BPC is well suited for complex planning and consolidations needs where the underlying transactional system is SAP ECC. It suits well if the organization has separate teams with BPC, ABAP, BW, Basis, Hana skillset. SAP BPC is less appropriate for organizations using Agile methodology. It is not suitable for organizations in a hyper-growth cycle as the installation and implementation is time-consuming. It will not work for organizations where the planning and budgeting needs keep changing frequently. The UI of SAP BPC is not very intuitive and very difficult to set up a dynamic dashboard for senior executives and officials of CxO.
Adaptive is much more versatile than most planning software, and in most ways better than Excel for planning and analytics. It is great and bringing together data from multiple sources, especially if on the Workday platform, and really allows your team to collaborate in real time without any issues unlike trying to work in Excel workbooks at the same time or needing an adminstrator to enter data for you. Power users can even update models and reports themselves and share with others. The flexibility of designing your own models is also great in allowing you to plan however granular you need and have different methods of planning for different business units but bring it all together consolidated.The reporting is the least useful feature. Yes, OfficeConnect gives you all the power of Excel and PowerPoint and is great if you can utilize it, but for now it only works on Windows when many businesses have shifted to Apple or Google platforms. Also, OfficeConnect is not fast or easy to use, like the web reports and web dashboards, which are great for quick ad-hoc reports but not great for presentation-level reports. This creates a huge disconnect in the quickness of analytics, if you want to run and show in depth analytics you'll need OfficeConnect due to the limited functionality and limited formula capabilites of Adaptive web reports which requires someone to build and maintain and refresh the OfficeConnect reports which is slow and not easily shared with other users.Also the planning functionality of the 3 sheet types have not been updated in years. Some new features or sheet types would be greatly appreciated.
SAP BPC is real time data. You can send information into the system and see it reflected in your reports immediately. Other systems may require a manual push into a reporting system.
SAP BPC is a shared reporting tool, so multiple users can be working in a model/environment at the same time, real time. This is especially helpful if your workbooks incorporated multiple processes requiring multiple users to get into the same model.
SAP BPC is a powerful tool designed to help all facets of the company, from cash flow to capital expenditures to headcount management to financial planning to consolidation.
It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM
Being from a law firm, the system needed a lot of custom tailoring in order to fit our full needs (although many companies could say the same thing). Although the ability to highly customize the system to the company's needs is a positive, it frequently results in the system responding in unexplainable and unrepeatable ways which negatively impacts and slows the budget process. Because of the sporadic nature and variety of the issues, we are unable to repeat them on cue and therefore cannot nail down a solution.
Variable Time Roll-ups. Different entities within our company look at "years" differently, but we're only able to specify one global time roll-up for aggregating data quickly, which can lead to some confusion.
Administrative UI. Management of Access Rules and ordering sheets from an administrative point of view can be a bit tedious and have received less attention than other features recently.
List Sheet Reporting. Any sheet that is a variable list of things (like People, Capital Projects, Marketing Programs) is somewhat constrained in how it can be reported on. Adaptive provides two kinds of reports but both leave something to be desired when reporting on this kind of data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SAP BPC training content and trainers are very good. The training is structured and provides a very good understanding of the product features and functionalities. I attended 6 separate training sessions of week-long or more. I had very good experience in all the sessions. The training is organized very well.
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.
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.
With Hyperion we struggled as it didn’t have integrated planning and consolidation, whereas BPC does have it. BPC is easier for reporting as it is Excel-based. Also BPC has prepackaged business process flows that helped a lot. Hyperion on the other hand has a faster response time for user queries or report generation.
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.
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
Adaptive Insights has had a positive impact on organizational expansion. With our break-even analysis we have created, what would once take place in a notebook or Excel, we have created templates and can run a conservative estimate on revenue and costs quite quickly. We have cut back on research and time on expansion by months this way, to mere hours.
One negative impact is the costs with implementing connections between our other ERP systems with Adaptive Insights. Currently, we would like to have near real-time data, but cannot due to the costs. Currently, I am tasked with uploading from multiple systems and this can be time consuming, especially during a close.
Overall, positively we have had an excellent experience. The ease of the functionality and the easy learning curve have enabled everyone on my team to have an enjoyable experience.
