Workday Adaptive Planning Reviews

Workday Adaptive Planning is an extremely flexible foundation to model almost anything. We've found ways to build detailed models that give the planners and management at the company valuable insights into how each department is planning for the future, thus providing management the information they need to shift course if necessary. Generally its reporting is robust but it's not a substitute for Business Intelligence tool.

We get strong and timely support when a ticket arises. The team that helps us is friendly and responsive.

It is working well for us so far. We implemented expenses in detail in the beginning and are now working through revenue/booking integration with NetSuite along with the integration with Workday for personnel.

We use outside consultants (Carlson Management Group) and they have been terrific business partners. June 2021 will be 2 yrs since we signed with them and we are still actively engaged with them.

Workday Adaptive Planning is great for both top down and bottoms up planning. We are also able to set the time level granularity as well as GL account level to which we plan and roll up actuals for comparison. We use Workday Adaptive Planning for headcount, P&L, Cash Flow, BS and Dashboards along with all monthly, quarterly and yearly reporting.

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.

[Workday Adaptive Planning is] great for forecasting OPEX items in the banking industry but not so good for ALM items

Enjoy using sheets, could have more training available for planning ideas

I have been a user, then an admin, and then implementor of Workday Adaptive Planning. Some people are still stuck in an Excel mindset and can find it cumbersome in the beginning, but once they grasp the logic of Workday Adaptive Planning, they start to appreciate the ease of adding new data, adding new dimensions to slice and dice data better, and generating reports and dashboards super fast. It will make headcount and OPEX variance analysis way easier. You can create all kinds of dashboards for all kinds of audiences (non-finance people, budget owners, board, execs, HR, accounting, etc.). You can even set up separate instances for advanced revenue forecasting and advanced sales commissions planning. Integration with Workday HCM makes the whole headcount recon process a breeze (from a budgeted request to a hired employee). I'd conclude by saying that to get optimal results, advanced training of users and admins is the key.

Amazing support. I love them. They are super efficient, very knowledgeable, fast, and friendly.

A great budgeting tool. Once everything is up and running we really only need to add in any incremental changes from the previous year. The reporting tool Office Connect is the best I have ever used. Less appropriate for multi-currency, multi-entity organizations and there needs to be an easier way to receive user inputs.

Customer support is great. They have always been very helpful.

Adaptive is a fantastic tool for any company still in spreadsheets. The transition to the cloud is made easy by Adaptive and the time to value is relatively low. The real value becomes apparent once the foundational model is set and you build incremental, linked models in the cloud. Real-time updates will impact various parts of your financial forecast and the forecast cycle is greatly shortened. Adaptive is not as suited for big data models at this time but is making progress in supporting this type of forecasting.

Support response time is always within 1 day which compares well with other cloud vendors we interact with daily. Support is facilitated via email/form, an upgrade would be a chat option within the tool for more real-time troubleshooting.

It's very well suited for almost any company - because it's like Excel you can create any model you like - the only caveat is you should know what you want very clearly - it's very dynamic.
The only place I would say it need work is the restatement of actuals - it changes any locked version using actuals as the overlay.

It's been always good - they respond very quick within 24 hours and if something is urgent they respond very quickly.

Adaptive is great if you have been using Excel models as a small company, and you're looking for a software to help build financial models that can more easily grow with your company.

It might not be the best option if you are an extremely large corporation as we've discovered that it can slow down substantially if sheets have too many rows. For example, if you are a company with several thousand employees, I don't think Adaptive is currently robust enough to support all of your data and planning.

Workday Adaptive Planning is well suited for building plans from the bottom up and involving other departments within your business. You can set up processes that allow you to track from within the system, the progress of the departments and imputing the data that’s required. The system is less appropriate for static planning, as the system is suited to be used for active planning and forecasting.

The online support for Workday Adaptive Planning is very helpful. I go there at least once a week to find answers to questions and they’re usually very easy to find. If i’m unsuccessful in finding the answer, I email Workday Adaptive Planning support and they’re quick to answer, willing to help, and provide great clarity on the answer if you need it.

Adaptive Insights is well-suited for accommodating different areas within the organization that have different cost drivers and/or have different allocation needs. The capability to design planning sheets using the lookup values offers flexibility that was difficult to produce with confidence in our other planning tool. Using dimensions and attributes within our organization's design, allows the ability to dissect data in different ways and report in more flexible formats to meet user needs. In addition, the OfficeConnect plug-in with Adaptive offers expanded Board reporting capabilities where Adaptive Reporting may come up short. The Discovery Dashboard provides quick visuals for C-Suite on demand.

Overall, I would rate Adaptive Insights as a 9. The reason it isn't higher is because I believe there is still some room to improve on the interface and usability of their product. If you are looking for a strong budgeting, planning and reporting capability but don't have a large budget, Adaptive is a great bang for the buck. I would give it a 10 in this category.

I like Adaptive Insights, a workday company as a budgeting and forecasting tool. I think, for the most part, the front-end interface is relatively user-friendly and easy to understand. Reporting seems to take some "advanced" user experience and seems complicated to use as an average day-to-day user. I find that if we need reports created or modified, we end up having to rely on our Adaptive expert.

I will never work for an FP&A Organization again if they do not have Adaptive Insights. It's that great of a product. Previously an FP&A Analyst had to be graded based on how quickly they could operate Microsoft Office, and how well they understood how their business works through manual processes. Now with so much of time being taken care of by Adaptive we can really shine and build better relationships with the business and dig deeper into Business questions.

This results in way more value being added to our Partners. Gone are the days of breaking links and passing around multiple templates for input from the business, they know have live information right after it becomes available.

Traning fresh analysts in Adaptive is a much simpler process than going through old excel templates that constantly were changing for business needs. Not to mention if you make a change and want to compare to historical reporting you would need to go and update a file that nobody has touched in months/years.

Adaptive Insights is a great planning tool. If an organization has multiple business units, the Adaptive Insights software will eliminate hours of work by eliminating the need to roll up spreadsheets. This will allow FP&A teams to focus more on analysis and adding value to their organization.

Adaptive Insights is well-suited for companies that operate with budgets that have multiple components and complex calculations.

The support team responds timely but typically on a pacific time vs. eastern standard time. I would prefer to have a phone number to call vs. email my questions and have issues answered in my time zone.

It is suited best for generating a basic suite of financial statements. I found it less appropriate for headcount reporting, and integration with ADP would be helpful.

I believe that Adaptive Insights is appropriate for any size organization and industry. This has made an ease of reporting for us in our Accounting and Finance department. Other departments may not be well suited for this, but I do see the application can be used by an HR team. That would be beneficial for keeping up with benefits, costs, training, new/terminated employees, etc., and making the budgeting and forecasting simpler on the finance and accounting side.

I've been most impressed with the ability to customize structures and hierarchies, centrally plan drivers and formulas, make user edits, track progress, and distribute results. I'm a big fan of the built-in customized reporting both in the cloud-based tool and in Excel and PowerPoint. Security can be a little cumbersome especially when there are sensitive personnel data involved.

Adaptive Insights revolutionized our financial reporting and board meeting preparation. Whereas before it might take us 7-10 days to prepare for a board meeting, now it takes less than a day. Now we spend more time analyzing and preparing data for decision makers as opposed to logistical time spent loading data into spreadsheets.

The only difficulty we have had with Adaptive is when we wanted to model something with cohorts as opposed to a monthly calendar. That is, Month 1, Month 2, Month 3 as opposed to Jan 2020, Feb 2020, etc. We were able to come up with a solution that has worked for quite a while now, but it took a lot of trial and error.

I believe Adaptive Insights is a great solution to make your overall budgeting and planning process more structured, efficient, and less error-prone. The sheets are clean and easy to get started. Version control is a big advantage compared to regular excel files. The workflow planning allows you to assign specific tasks to different users to keep track of your overall budgeting cycles. What we have not implemented yet are more sophisticated predictive models like regression models and/or Monte Carlo simulations. We are still trying to figure out what the possibilities withing Adaptive are.

Whether you have a large or small company, simple or complex organizational structure, Adaptive is well suited for any organization in any industry. It is great for budgeting, planning, multiple-scenario planning, reporting and forecasting.

Adaptive Insights is extremely customizable, so I think it would be a great tool for companies of almost all sizes and in various industries. It's helped streamline our budgeting and forecasting processes tremendously and is the single source of truth for our company. Reporting is also less manual and tedious for the entire finance team.

As it is almost a blank slate when you receive access to your instance, I highly recommend getting a consultant to help with your implementation or to have someone at your company who is adept with systems and has a background in finance.

Adaptive Insights is a useful tool once it is completely implemented and you have users in the system that know how it works. There is definitely a learning curve, but once that is hurdled, you can find many benefits to the system. A major user case for Adaptive Insights is when you need users/managers to see the up-to-date financials without giving them access to the financial system.

Adaptive Insights is definitely appropriate when generating any sort of financial reporting. Perhaps you have to generate a report about clients expenditures over the last two years, then Adaptive would be suited for that. You can set the categories specifically and narrow data down significantly. Adaptive would not be as appropriate for smaller-scale tasks, but can still be used for it. The user just won't get as much from it.