Sisense vs. Workday Adaptive Planning

I believe Sisense is perfectly suited for any organization of any size that have access to the proper resources, as the tool is very expensive. The data connectors come in all shapes and sizes out of the box, which allows a great deal of data control within the ElastiCubes. Additionally, while the platform only runs on Windows platforms, the web application can be accessed on any client: mobile, Apple, Windows, etc. This allows a much more flexible user experience, resulting in data and dashboards reaching further than any other tool.

Incentivized

If your company requires headcount and enterprise initiative planning across departments, it really helps to see the impacts at the company level. It is well-suited for conducting what-if scenarios and beneficial if you already have Workday HCM with position management. It may not be well-suited to companies that require custom dashboards.

Incentivized

• The biggest pro I found with Sisense is that you do not need a DBA in order to manage the system. This makes the learning curve really easy, which helps lots when thinking of implementation across a whole organization. This reflects well for the tool, since it is powerful, but easy to use.
• ALL-IN-ONE! Sisense answered all of my customers and our company's requirements, to include data modelling and complex calculations.
• Sisense is as accurate as your data, and best of all, it is real time. After using other visualization tools, I learned that when using multiple sources, errors occur. Sisense prevents this risk by allowing all of the resources to be managed at their engine, maintains connections, and as a developer, the EliastiCube allows you to source large volumes of data with an easy click.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Some functionality is missing as built-in functionality, and can only be added by using Javascript, which requires technical knowledge of JS from the dashboard designer to implement. So although almost anything is possible to implement, some things which should be basic require high-level skills.
• Viewers of dashboards have very limited customization options, almost any customization requires the dashboards designer to implement.
• Particularly, viewers are unable to select conditional formatting, rename fields, change the order of items, etc.

Incentivized

• Dashboards are not the best for graphs/charts. However, I have heard of companies using the dashboards for forecasting/budgeting. I would like to see Workday Adaptive Planning demonstrate this part of the feature.
• Better security or locks to prevent deleting Actuals data - you are literally one click away from doing this.
• On the web-based reports, better functionality when needing to reverse the sign in calculations - right now it is only available for revenue vs. expenses.

Incentivized

I think the business and myself as a user has come to rely on SiSense as a dashboarding and quick ad-hoc reporting tool. I am hoping to integrate SiSense dashboards into more parts of the business in the future. We have reduced our report turn-around time for the most part from hours/days to minutes and in some cases almost the speed of thought. Reports are also easier on the eye and more easily distributed. I would also like to say that the support and professionalism from the SiSense team has been excellent.

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.

There is no doubt it is easy to use solution. It always equips me with authentic reporting, I can have the detailed analysis of the operations. This tool has helped me to collect every bit of the data and it would be just to say that it has influenced my lead generation and helped to build strong customer relations.

Incentivized

It is overwhelming at first, but once you really get to know it, you realize it is fairly simple and customizable, and then it has a lot more limitations than you first thought. Realizing those limitations and finding workarounds is when you know you've mastered the software.

Incentivized

There are very few situations when there is unexpected downtime. Mostly during development, new dashboard implementation and during upgrades. other then that there were very few crashes.

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.

SiSense is usually performing better then other solutions even if going for complex reports/dashboards(of course within reasonable frames). I haven't noticed any bad influence on other systems, usually if something happens it stays within SiSense.

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.

SiSense's support ninjas are very knowledgeable and are exceptionally responsive. So far, all of the issues we ran into were resolved within minimum time. My sense of dealing with the support staff at SiSense is that they are very focused on not just answering your immediate question, but also to delve into the cause of the matter.

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.

Incentivized

Easy and free training that allowed us quickly understand basics in SiSense and start using them. More advanced features requires some browsing through SiSense forums, but there is always support to help, and SiSense support is one of the best whith which I worked so far.

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.

Incentivized

Many examples, videos and scenarios which you try on your own right away. This combined with in-person training gives you enough to utilize most of SiSense's power.

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.

Incentivized

Would like to have more information about configuration of dev to production deployments architectures.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Sisense was chosen as our BI platform for a few key reasons. Excellent customer support is a key reason why. Additionally, continuing innovation in new product features and the ability to embed reports and do quite a bit in terms of customization.

Incentivized

For best-in-class capabilities, you'll very likely need to split the various HR and financial systems into separate systems rather than using a consolidated platform like Workday. However, a consolidated platform provides benefits by being a single location for employees and a single system for IT developers to work with. This would need to be compared to employee efficiencies gained by working with better systems.

Incentivized

Product is quite easily scalable. The whole installation can be easily moved to stronger machine if needed.

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

• Report development time is reduced from 2~3 days to 2~3 hours.
• Report querying time is improved from 0.5~10 mins to 2~30 seconds.
• A 2-staff team delivers 10 times the BI output that we did on the old system.
• We were able to deliver BI and data analysis for all business functions instead of a very limited group of users

• it is easier to take critical business decisions in the organization and respond to stakeholder early
• migration of resources like cloud, servers or operating system or migrations does not lead to impact on platform
• helps calculates complex metrics requires for financial and resource planning

Incentivized