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Great product when properly trained
Updated December 16, 2022

Great product when properly trained

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Workday Adaptive Planning

I use Adaptive Insights for mainly budgeting purposes and running monthly budget vs actual reports. It has helped the company dramatically with ensuring that we are using the correct and same version of the approved budget. We have 27 different entities creating budgets and within those entities up to 80 different departments. Before Adaptive Insights, there were a lot of Excel spreadsheets emailed back and forth. This created issues with version control. Adaptive Insights has also forced the company across all entities to map their chart of accounts in a similar fashion and use accounts for the same purpose.
  • It does well with version control. I can ensure that all 27 entities know exactly which version is the correct budget that is approved.
  • It does well with scenario planning. I can easily make adjustments with to the budget whether that is pushing sales, expenses, headcount, or capital projects.
  • It does a good job with enforcing unity with the chart of accounts.
  • It does permissions for different groups well.
  • It did reporting groups and distribution well.
  • There has been a real lack of training. This has caused issues especially with creating new reports.
  • There could be better shortcut keys similar to Excel.
  • There could be a better search functionality with the self tutorial area.
  • The budget vs actual report creation time has been dramatically decreased from days to hours.
  • The budgets are better known and easily accessed by all groups that have a budget.
  • Because of lack of training, there are still manual processes where reports have to exported and manually updated.
It helped the organization with data governance. It ensured the data was clean and conformed to the requirements. This allowed the team to focus on the reports and discussing the data instead of cleaning it. It made the company have data to make better decisions and understand what impact decisions would have on the financials. It also allowed for budget owners to better understand where they were spending their money.
I think that the budgeting side is easy and nobody in the company had any issues with entering in budgets or being able to find their budget after the fact or their actuals. The issue I have is it isn't not as easy to create reports and custom accounts for very specific charts and reports.
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 their budgets.

Do you think Workday Adaptive Planning delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Workday Adaptive Planning's feature set?

Yes

Did Workday Adaptive Planning live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Workday Adaptive Planning go as expected?

No

Would you buy Workday Adaptive Planning again?

Yes

It works well with budgeting across large organizations. It helped with version control of the budget/forecast. There was a clear understanding around which the approved and default versions were. It enforced a set chart of accounts. It required the various groups across the organization to conform to be on the same page. It was easy to create a new budget/forecast version, distribute it to the organization, and track their progress.

Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings

7.8
Long-term financial planning
9
Financial budgeting
9
Forecasting
9
Scenario modeling
7
Management reporting
5
Consolidation and Close ()
Not Rated
7.5
Financial Statement Reporting
8
Management Reporting
8
Excel-based Reporting
7
Automated board and financial reporting
7
6.0
Personalized dashboards
7
Color-coded scorecards
4
KPIs
7
Cost and profitability analysis
6
Key Performance Indicator setting
7
Benchmarking with external data
5
7.3
Flat file integration
7
Excel data integration
8
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
7
BI Standard Reporting ()
Not Rated
Ad-hoc Reporting ()
Not Rated
Report Output and Scheduling ()
Not Rated
Data Discovery and Visualization ()
Not Rated
Access Control and Security ()
Not Rated
Mobile Capabilities ()
Not Rated

Using Workday Adaptive Planning

100 - The FP&A, accounting, executives, and budget owners are the main users of the software.
4 - The head of FP&A, Manager of FP&A, and two analysts are the super users and the main support that do most of the support. There is the occasional IT resource that helps with integration aspects.
  • Version control
  • Scenario planning
  • Report distribution
  • Unifying the chart of accounts amongst all the entities
  • Faster report distribution
  • User access to confidential information
  • Better Margin and Sku planning
  • more driver based planning
  • 18-24 month rolling forecast
The model has been setup and improved. It would take too much work to switch. There is more that can be put into the model to make it better.

Evaluating Workday Adaptive Planning and Competitors

Yes - It replaced a pure excel model.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
The product features were the most important aspect for the organization. We needed a product that was able to do version control, ensure security and rights access for the users, and something that would continue to scale with the company's fast pace growth. The ease of use for the budget owners was important to use so that they could be more self sufficient.
The continued support and training. That has improved but initially it was a bit of a challenge.

Workday Adaptive Planning Implementation

It went relatively fast and smoothly from the Adaptive Planning side, most the delays were internal issues that needed to be resolved.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes - We did a budget phase, actual phase, and then an automation phase. This helped us get the most use out of it from the beginning and there wasn't much buy in or resources needed from the rest of the company.
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation - This was an FP&A project but it would have been more effective and well accepted if we had brought in the accounting team earlier and shown then how it could improve their processes and accuracy.
  • Moving at a proper speed.
  • training the the users to fix issue with the model instead of relying on the implementation team
  • Making sure there was buy in from the organization
  • Training the end users on the software

Workday Adaptive Planning Training

  • Online Training
  • In-Person Training
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.

Using Workday Adaptive Planning

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Creating new versions
  • The user administration
  • Updating the sheets
  • Learning how to do new formulas
  • There was some complexity with integrations
  • Updating formulas into new levels