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.
My decision came down to Adaptive vs Host Analytics. Host made the claim that because their sheets were just like excel, you wouldn't need to learn any new commands. Rather, I thought that was a downside. I didn't want another glorified version of excel, I was looking for …
Workday Adaptive Planning is not as robust as SAP Ariba, but it is certainly better than BadgePass. The trouble with BadgePass is that it can be a but clunky in some modules that seem like clear bolt ons to the main product UI. Whereas, Ariba was clearly built to satisfy …
Workday is the only software system (outside of Excel) that has been used by Vera to do our planning and analysis. We have just opted to move to Workday Adaptive Planning for our accounting system, payroll, and supply chain with the hopes that it will make our planning that …
I haven't used a separate planning tool in great depth like Adaptive. Our company used Host Analytics prior to Adaptive but I didn't have a lot of experience with it. The other software I've used for planning is Excel. Excel is obviously capable of a lot of complex lookups and …
Verified User
Executive
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Our previous platform was patchwork tools and unintegrated. We were clunky and poorly organized. The system was slow and
difficult to use, and it was either overhaul it or start over. We evaluated our
options holistically and went with Workday. It works better and faster, and …
I like how easy Essbase is to pull reports - but I think that OfficeConnect fills that gap. When looking at Hyperion vs Adaptive, I think that Adaptive's input is much easier to navigate. I like Adaptive much more. Because input is so much easier, it helps me be in the system …
We did not go through a full-blown software selection process, nor have I used other products in the past. Previous to Adaptive, we used Management Reporter (formerly FRx, now part of Microsoft Dynamics GP) for our financial statements, and Excel for our budgeting. Adaptive …
Workday provides adaptive and intuitive planning that does not has disruptions when there is any change in system or migrations of servers, users or systems. Workday integrates with CRM, ERP and other database engines to source data and provides insights that can be exported to …
From our initial findings, Workday Adaptive seemed like it was going to be easier to get up and running out of the box and fit the needs of our company more.
Our previous tool for Forecasting and Budgeting was Microsoft Excel and for sure Adaptive stacks up when we compare both ways. Just to mention the data traceability, configurability and time saving that Adaptive Insights has brought to our department.
Verified User
Manager
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
I prefer Adaptive Planning in comparison to Planful and Data Rails. It feels like is has been easier to use with a quicker learning curve. The other systems were more intimidating for the nonfinance users, like the budget owners who would only need it for reporting or inputting …
Adaptive stood out because it seemed on the easier end to implement and has a wide customer base (so it is easier to hire people who have used the system before). The total cost of ownership was competitive and scales with the number of seats.
My previous experience was with Hyperion Essbase , a number of years ago. Comparing the products at the time I used them, I would probably rate Essbase slightly higher in terms or how powerful it was. Having said that, the upfront cost was likely tenfold for Essbase. Even if …
It doesn't have the same standard fulfillment modeling as the true workforce planning products, it equals the other core HCM systems and beats them on ease of use.
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 …
The main thing that sets [Workday] Adaptive [Planning] apart is the fact that it is a cloud based software, user friendly, and allows you to add to or change the model relatively easily. Hyperion is a good tool also but there is more flexibility with [Workday] Adaptive …
All of the systems have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Workday Adaptive Planning as a system is further along in overall functionality and is a more user-friendly system compared to other EPM systems on the market.
We did some analysis of Anaplan, but it seemed they were built for much bigger companies. It did not seem like we could implement and maintain Anaplan without significant IT support, which was one of the main goals of the project. Anaplan did seem like it could have more …
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.
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
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.
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.
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.