Excellent planning and forecasting tool. Strong ROI.
October 15, 2012

Excellent planning and forecasting tool. Strong ROI.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Insights

Pros

  • It's done everything we need to I have been very happy with it.
  • It's created tremendous efficiency for It would have spent 2 people a weeks time to get information out for a forecast and get it back Became a couple of hours.

Cons

  • There are other things in the product you wish were When started out, reporting was an issue – however it has slowly gotten to the point where it's not an issue anymore.
  • We can sleep better at night knowing that all the data is in one place and we can access it and not in spreadsheets linked together that can bust.
  • It provides one common source of data that people can Otherwise people can say, that’s not my If it’s in Adaptive Planning, then that’s the number.
  • People time We were spending 2 people’s time for a full week each month – basically 0.5 FTE It has also allowed us to scale w/out adding people.
  • It has allowed us to make quicker iterations during annual planning process
  • We are getting a clear ROI from FTE saving Now, the value of accessing data is big
Host Analytics which we also reviewed in-depth (saw demos, had department heads and users to sit in on demos, talked to vendor supplied references with both companies, asked same list of standard questions)

Adaptive planning was:
a) More intuitive - the team could envisage what they needed to do and seemed intuitive to do those things.
b) Price was better
c) Our VP of IT talked to both. Adaptive Planning knew what they were doing security wise and knew what their issues were. The Host Analytics guys did not understand the potential issues they would be facing.
They wouldn’t disclose financials, so we did diligence on their investors and they were reputable. They were also on several lists of fast growing privately held companies, so we were comfortable with their financial viability.

Even if you don’t pick Adaptive Planning, choose something to get off spreadsheets as fast as you can.

There is a data storage limit, but haven’t come close to hitting. They will give us notice if we start bumping up. They do have an archiving ability.

Using Adaptive Insights

50 - We have ~50 seats with 4-5 admin users, everyone else is a normal user.

We tried read only for CEO, CFO and they didn’t use.
  • Primarily annual planning and forecasting – both operating and capex.
I just renewed.

Evaluating Adaptive Insights and Competitors

Adaptive Insights Implementation

It was very good. The person we worked with from AP was very good. The revenue model they built had a very slick design.

There were two choices of implementation – 1) Guided where we would have done most of the work; full; 2) where the vendor did implementation.

We chose the full implementation. A consultant from the vendor would go off and do some work, and we would get back together on Webex, then could tweak and make suggestions. It was an iterative process.

I recommend the full implementation route. In seminar we went to, I sat next to someone who had done the guided implementation and she wished she hadn’t.

You should assign someone to be a project lead on your side. They should be in finance, not IT.
  • vendor

Adaptive Insights Training

  • Online training
All training is recorded on web. You can find special topics.

Requires a little more time for a super admin if you are trying to build model.

Sometimes it would be good to have in-person interaction.

Adaptive Insights Support

Everything front line is through email.

You get responses typically within 24 hours
The responses are of high quality
You can get anyone - not mapped to specific support reps.

Using Adaptive Insights

It is very logical in the way it flows. It makes sense.
It is very intuitive in the things you want to do.

However, it's not solving a really hard problem.

Integrating Adaptive Insights

  • Netsuite
It can integrate to Netsuite – but we haven’t done that. The NetSuite integration seemed pricey for what it gave us – a push button to transfer data from NetSuite to Adaptive Planning. Our administrator just takes a file and downloads it, it just takes 15 minutes. For a bigger company it would make more sense.

Relationship with Adaptive Insights

They did not negotiate much

All pricing and discounts available posted on website – take it or leave it

You get discounts for adding more users and for a longer term contract, paying all upfront.

They are very transparent – all incentives on website.

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