Adaptive is very insightful!
September 27, 2018

Adaptive is very insightful!

Gary Grzesiak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Insights

We use Adaptive for all of our budget development, forecasting, analysis and management reporting. Adaptive is used across the whole organization. Adaptive allowed us to move away from manual spreadsheet forecasting, develop budgets using staffing, travel, capital assumptions. Also real time KPI's and dashboards was a real business need for our association and Adaptive provides that solution. The ease of loading actual data from our transactional system gives us real time financials that we did not previously have the capability . OfficeConnect allows us to run our monthly budget reports in a timely fashion as our previous system had to be run over night due to serve issues without the amount of data.
  • Allows assumptions to be created for fringes, taxes, capital etc. We are now able to push these type of expenses to individual departments as opposed to a single department. Gives us true costs for each department.
  • The flexibility in revising and creating new sheets allows our organization to modify our budget/forecast approach without much downtime. Also, we can make these modifications internally . No need to hire consultants to complete these tasks.
  • Adaptive Insights is an easy to use/understand tool for end-users. Our users typically struggle with new systems but the Adaptive roll-out was very smooth with very little end-user angst.
  • The format of reports when downloaded to Excel or PowerPoint could use improvement.
  • Would be nice if you could inactivate GL accounts when they are no longer being used.
  • Suppress rows functionality when set by the administrator to default to suppress if not data doesn't always seem to work.
  • Budget and forecast cycles have been reduced due to the ease of data input by our end-users. We used to allow user a month to input annual budget data and we can now complete this process in two and a half weeks.
  • Forecasts used to be completed using Excel by our 17 divisions. Adaptive has allowed for us to complete the forecast process using the Adaptive tool which allows us to consolidate our forecasts immediately versus a manual process.
  • Month-end reporting used to take us 5 days to complete our package prior to using Adaptive. Our organization can now finalize our reporting in no more than 3 days due many of the reports coming straight from Adaptive.
Adaptive has improved our reporting and analysis ten fold due taking many manual spreadsheets and automating monthly reporting and analysis. During our budget development we have been able to utilize what-if analysis to determine the impact of eliminating programs/activities during budget discussions with management. Our budget accuracy has improved by about 10% since implementing Adaptive particularly staff allocations to programs. We were not able to come up with true costs of programs prior to using Adaptive and we now have a sheet where the end-users allocate staff time by percentage to each program.
The biggest impact for me individually has been spending significantly less time assisting end-users with budget inputs and more time analyzing the data that has been input. Additionally, the response time of Adaptive is great as we have had no system outages. Our previous system was very slow and some times the outages would last an entire day and we would need to have a paid consultant assist with getting the system back up and running.
Adaptive blows away Hyperion from an ease of use, functionality and performance standpoint. The reason we selected Adaptive initially was the flexibility of the tool (sheets), going from manual forecasts to a web based tool and being able to build assumptions into our budget and forecasting processes. Also, the cost of Adaptive licenses provided significant savings when compared to the annual fees that we paid Oracle for use and support of their system.
Adaptive is great if you want to create many what- if scenarios when budgeting and forecasting. Staffing scenarios has been particularly helpful for our HR department when analyze staff needs for future years and analyzing open and unfilled positions over a certain time frame.

Every so often Adaptive's response time when in the system has been slow but Adaptive has rolled out the Elastic Hypercube to take care of that issue.

Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
10
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
10
Scenario modeling
10
Management reporting
9
Detailed Audit Trails
10
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
9
Excel-based Reporting
7
Automated board and financial reporting
9
Personalized dashboards
9
Color-coded scorecards
9
KPIs
9
Cost and profitability analysis
9
Key Performance Indicator setting
9
Excel data integration
9
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
8

Using Adaptive Insights

Menus are easy to navigate, sheets are straightforward and flexible and you can work on your budget/forecasts without being at the office. The cloud based system makes it easy for users to complete their processes offsite and without needing there work provided computer. Creating new reports using both the web based Adaptive tool and OfficeConnect is quite simple with very minimal training.