Reshaping The Financial Planning Landscape
December 31, 2019
Reshaping The Financial Planning Landscape
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Insights, a Workday company
We are working towards Adaptive Insights being the single source of truth for Financial Reporting within the Comcast Technology Solutions by combining Business Data to drive forecasting. We were the first group within Comcast to implement Adaptive. There are other instances that are currently being launched as well.
Right now it is primarily the FP&A team that makes changes, and for revenue, for we have business operations partners that input their customer revenue forecast.
We previously were using Essbase to do all of our planning, but the CTS group operates quite differently compared to the rest of Comcast. Imagine operating a startup inside a cable box. Adaptive gives us the flexibility to make detailed changes to our business units and accounts quickly and have immediate reporting results. As opposed to keeping track of detailed Essbase strings, making changes and then waiting every two hours to make sure they were made correctly.
Right now it is primarily the FP&A team that makes changes, and for revenue, for we have business operations partners that input their customer revenue forecast.
We previously were using Essbase to do all of our planning, but the CTS group operates quite differently compared to the rest of Comcast. Imagine operating a startup inside a cable box. Adaptive gives us the flexibility to make detailed changes to our business units and accounts quickly and have immediate reporting results. As opposed to keeping track of detailed Essbase strings, making changes and then waiting every two hours to make sure they were made correctly.
- Live Reporting - The ability to constantly see your change impacts, using the Audit Trail to identify the users making the change, and transaction details for actual significantly freed up valuable bandwidth to spend more time on forecast accuracy.
- Flexibility to change Business Structure and have those changes flow through historically without any effort. Used to have various Xref files everywhere.
- Corporate Consolidation - Being able to have multiple Organizations roll up into a group that is not managed by us. We still need to use export into Essbase for our HQ partners until Adaptive can fully integrate the two seamlessly.
- Web Reporting can be inflexible at times, especially when it comes to notes. Office Connect helps to fill that gap, but we would rather use web reporting when we can.
- The biggest return on investment is the time the analysts and users have gained. We have never been so productive as a team.
- Adaptive was the perfect solution to help manage our Customer Billing, we had recently transitioned billing systems and keeping track of old and new IDs across 10+ excel files was a very manual and inaccurate process. Dimension and Account mappings fixed all of that.
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 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.