Item: Workday Adaptive Planning
Rating: 10
Author: Chris Snelling, CFA

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company uses the Adaptive Planning module. Although some of our sales managers and human resources are occasional users, it is mainly used by our Financial Planning and Analysis department. Our financials are in SAP and our company does not have an adequate reporting tool to get useful information from SAP. We use Adaptive to download and populate our profit and cost center structure into Adaptive Planning. We also build our annual budget and forecasts using Adaptive Planning. Perhaps the most used function is the reporting, where we compare actual performance to budget across hundreds of cost centers each month. Using the product we are able to streamline our reporting process and do the work of an army of analysts with just two people.

Pros and Cons

Adaptive Planning is very good at letting you create reports on the fly. We constantly create, modify and run reports to help analyze and find solutions.
Although it took a while to setup, the Adaptive Connector makes it super easy to load all of the detailed financial information from SAP into our reporting system.
Managing multiple versions of our budget and forecasts is quite easy with Adaptive Planning.

We have had some customer service issues in the past but have worked through them with the Adaptive team.
The compatibility with javascript has been an issue in the past and has caused some lost productivity, but I think this issue has been resolved with the latest release.

Return on Investment

Adaptive has reduced the time spent generating reports each month by several days. After automating with the Adaptive connector and after creating VBA programs to automate the formatting of the reports (our executives still prefer paper copies), I was able increase monthly productivity by several days. We were able to do with two people what we used to do with three.

Alternatives Considered

The only alternative I've used is reporting from Excel and Access. Both are manual procedures that don't stack up to the automation that we get from Adaptive.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Likelihood to Renew

Our company is upgrading our SAP system this year and exploring one of the SAP reporting modules, but I don't think it will affect our renewal of Adaptive, especially since I know they are going to roll out an Office integration tool later this year.

Products Replaced

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation

Having the product functionality we needed was the biggest single factor in selecting Adaptive Insights.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

Would not change the selection process.

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a major issue with the implementation - To fully implement Adaptive Insights into your business it is important to have buy-in from the managers that will use it. Most managers prefer to do things the old way until you can prove to them the new way is better and that it is easy to adopt.

A Great Budgeting Software for those on a Budget

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Insights, a Workday company