Workday Adaptive Planning

Not as robust as SAP Ariba - better than BadgePass.

I haven't used any products like Adaptive Insights.

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.

Workday Adaptive Planning has transformed the FP&A function in my company allowed me to establish my team as a center of and reporting to support business excellence. The Workday implementation team that helped us implement the tool listened and understood the problems we wanted to analytical problems easily.

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.

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 [Planning], and it feels more intuitive.

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 much better and more precise.

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.

Adaptive seemed to be the most user-friendly, easy to implement, and cost-effective solution.

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 capabilities, but the amount of work we would have to do to successfully set up and maintain the system seemed extensive and hard to achieve.

Workday is much more formal and truly feels like a useful portal for you to get information. In term of getting information, working on HR related matters, I have not found any other software that is as useful as Workday. This will absolutely reduce your cost of operating activities in HR and cost of storing physical documents.

Adaptive is much more flexible and powerful for our needs. It provides a wealth of reporting tools and capabilities that Cognos simply didn't or couldn't provide. The ability to have a team of one completely implement and manage the solution for a company is not unreasonable (as I'm currently doing this). Based on my previous experience, that would probably not be the case with other solutions.

The only alternative we looked at was BI360, and there really is no comparison. The choice was easy to go with Adaptive. We strongly wanted to move away from working with Excel spreadsheets, which was apparently a selling point of BI360. It was clear to us that the stability of the platform, and the ability to plan in real-time with others working in the same sheets was much stronger in Adaptive.

I haven't used any alternatives.

We were using Oracle EPBCS prior to Adaptive and it sucked. It always broke when we were in crunch mode and Oracle support was lousy. I have used other home grown systems which worked well for the industry we were in. I feel the Workday Adaptive Planning is spot on for budgets/forecasts planning. We are currently working on Dashboards for the Executive team (not rolled out yet) and streamlining the board reports.

Adaptive planning was selected for a different use case of financial planning and management reporting to which is lives up to expectations. We are pleased with Workday's commitment to expand the product offering as the demands of the business continue to grow.

It's very easy as an administrator to use Adaptive.

Ease of use for all levels, allocation rule management, report creating and distribution, refined level of detail if needed. Support was in the same time zone and implementation partners were very good to work with. Overall, we started with 16 potential vendors and narrowed down to top 3, and Workday Adaptive Planning came out on top!

I haven't evaluated any other tools at this point as Adaptive was already in place at my company when I started this job.

I have either used Excel or budgeting tools within the accounting software packages. Excel can be tricky and error-prone due to formulas, but they are customizable, and you can adjust things on the fly. Accounting software budgeting tools are usually minimal and are not user-friendly when working with department heads. They are not visually appealing, and that can turn off end users.

I've primarily used Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management in the past and Adaptive Insights stacks up favorably against them. Hyperion is not nearly as intuitive, frequently requires a consultant or programmer to do anything outside of customized reporting, and is much more cost-effective both with the implementation but also the ongoing expense.

We didn't evaluate other products. Adaptive Insights was highly recommended by our consultants.

We looked at essentially three different products. Essbase (Current), Adaptive Insights, and Anaplan. We knew that Essbase wasn't the right solution for our business with historical experience, it was too difficult to forecast at the detailed business unit, department, and account-level accurately.

We ultimately chose Adaptive over Anaplan because of its UI is much simpler for new users. Anaplan seemed like it had the ability to be more flexible, but at the cost of User Experience. It had a larger learning curve and was more technical from a planning standpoint. We did not want to feel self-reliant on consultants constantly. With Adaptive we didn't have that fear. We could pick it up easier and starting using its pre-built structure right away. I think we made the right choice, I was the only analyst on the team at the time of integration and I was able as a new user to be completely independent on the day to day tasks. We only needed help from our Consultant partners for larger projects, and even then I was able to reverse engineers a lot of it to fit our other needs.

We ultimately chose Adaptive Insights as we wanted budget owners to use our budgeting/forecasting tool on a regular basis, and we felt that Adaptive was the most user-friendly for non-finance folks.