Drive Better Enterprise Performance Management with Adaptive Insights
Updated April 27, 2016
Drive Better Enterprise Performance Management with Adaptive Insights
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Software Version
2015.01
Modules Used
- Planning
- Discovery
- Reporting
- Consolidation
- Integration
Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Suite
Enterprise Performance Management
We use Adaptive to drive planning, budgeting, forecasting and financial reporting for ABM Systems.
We also use it to enable our clients to drive better corporate performance. Our clients range from SME to large enterprise.across commerce, industry and government.
Adaptive helps us develop better business plans integrating with our ERP, CRM and other systems from revenue and cost of sales forecasting to remuneration plans and expense budgeting.
Adaptive allows us to build plans collaboratively, consolidating plans and actuals in real time, and to generate better quality reports, more efficiently.
We use Adaptive to drive planning, budgeting, forecasting and financial reporting for ABM Systems.
We also use it to enable our clients to drive better corporate performance. Our clients range from SME to large enterprise.across commerce, industry and government.
Adaptive helps us develop better business plans integrating with our ERP, CRM and other systems from revenue and cost of sales forecasting to remuneration plans and expense budgeting.
Adaptive allows us to build plans collaboratively, consolidating plans and actuals in real time, and to generate better quality reports, more efficiently.
- Adaptive is methodology agnostic. As strategic imperatives change from growth to operational efficiency users can change their planning approach from driver based, top down planning to bottom up, zero based or just build on prior periods with rolling forecasts and more.
- Adaptive is collaborative and enterprise class. Enterprises can engage all users to work together in real time to build more effective plans where ones outputs are drivers to others. Yet all have visibility over where the numbers originate with drill through and drill to transaction for explaining when plans are not achieved. And all can see who changed what, when with an audit trail.
- Adaptive reporting is fabulous.The quality of Adaptive reports is fantastic. Adaptive Reporting empowers users to streamline board quality report pack production and other reporting needs. Users can self serve for reporting. Users can annotate reports. Reporting integrates with MS Office, PDF and other applications.
- Adaptive Discovery dashboards are nice but they are not a Business Intelligence solution.The dashboards provide users with very attractive dashboards and charts but they only enable cube based hierarchical drill. They do not enable robust, sophisticated, multi-dimensional analytics the way modern BI tools do.
- Budget Adjustments - Adaptive Consolidation provides great functionality for entering journals. It would be nice to have this sort of capability available for processing budget adjustments especially for the public sector.
- Email Alerts - Whilst some email alerts are enabled it would be nice if more types were added like out of tolerance alerts
- IBM Cognos TM1,Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management,SAP BPM,BOARD,arcplan,Anaplan,Host Analytics Cloud EPM Suite,Infor EPM,SAS Financial Intelligence,Oracle BPM Suite,Calumo,Corporate Planning,Host Analytics,Longview,Business Objects SRC,Bitam,Microsoft Excel
Large Stack Vendors
Compared with financial planning and reporting offerings from IBM Cognos TM1, SAP BPM and Oracle BPM Suite / Hyperion, the Adaptive Suite offers most of the capability but deploys in around 10-30% of the time and provides total cost of ownership savings of over 70%!
Niche Vendors
Compared with niche Corporate Performance Management vendors like Anaplan, arcplan, Corporate Planning, Board, Host Analytics and Calumo, especially for organisations employing 200 or more personnel, the Adaptive Suite offers significant more enterprise class capabilities to drive better, faster planning, reporting and business outcomes. For example, centralised formulae and assumption control, user security and audit trail, process documentation and workflow control, integration to core systems, integrated dashboards and pixel perfect reporting.Most are very hard to deploy using old fashioned client server technologies and are very dependent on restrictive cube based structures, and very hard to deploy for small to medium organisations.
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheet technologies like Microsoft Excel offer great personal productivity capabilities but do not provide enterprise level functionality (e.g. user credential based security, single source of the truth etc.) As a result they are easy to break and hard to maintain and prone to error, and do not offer easy or anywhere near real time consolidation.
Compared with financial planning and reporting offerings from IBM Cognos TM1, SAP BPM and Oracle BPM Suite / Hyperion, the Adaptive Suite offers most of the capability but deploys in around 10-30% of the time and provides total cost of ownership savings of over 70%!
Niche Vendors
Compared with niche Corporate Performance Management vendors like Anaplan, arcplan, Corporate Planning, Board, Host Analytics and Calumo, especially for organisations employing 200 or more personnel, the Adaptive Suite offers significant more enterprise class capabilities to drive better, faster planning, reporting and business outcomes. For example, centralised formulae and assumption control, user security and audit trail, process documentation and workflow control, integration to core systems, integrated dashboards and pixel perfect reporting.Most are very hard to deploy using old fashioned client server technologies and are very dependent on restrictive cube based structures, and very hard to deploy for small to medium organisations.
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheet technologies like Microsoft Excel offer great personal productivity capabilities but do not provide enterprise level functionality (e.g. user credential based security, single source of the truth etc.) As a result they are easy to break and hard to maintain and prone to error, and do not offer easy or anywhere near real time consolidation.
Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings
Using Adaptive Suite
15 -
We have 15 users internally.
We also support around 2500 users across 50 separate implementations, the largest single one having 500, next 315.
Adaptive Suite Implementation
- Implemented in-house
- Professional services company
Easy Implementation with Skills Transfer
ABM Systems (www.abmsystems.com) have implemented the Adaptive Suite internally and for many customers across commerce, industry and government.
The solution set is intuitive, so we always encourage users to work with us through the scoping diagnostic and to rapid prototype a proof of concept.
This helps clients develop confidence that the tool-set is fit for purpose and that they can easily OWN the solution. We then provide options on either a complete self-service implementation, a consulting intensive turn-key option or our preferred Skills Transfer and Rollout (STaR) option which is a collaborative, coaching oriented, consulting approach.
ABM Systems (www.abmsystems.com) have implemented the Adaptive Suite internally and for many customers across commerce, industry and government.
The solution set is intuitive, so we always encourage users to work with us through the scoping diagnostic and to rapid prototype a proof of concept.
This helps clients develop confidence that the tool-set is fit for purpose and that they can easily OWN the solution. We then provide options on either a complete self-service implementation, a consulting intensive turn-key option or our preferred Skills Transfer and Rollout (STaR) option which is a collaborative, coaching oriented, consulting approach.
Yes - 1. Scoping
We scope the implementation by working our way through the scoping diagnostic, reviewing existing budget models and reports, and facilitating a rapid prototype. Migration and process improvement options are assessed. Key stakeholders and project team members are determined. A project plan is prepared.
2. Mobilisation
This typically involves initial administrator training, development of a change management plan and communication to all impacted people.
3. Build
This commences with import of the charts of accounts, organisational structures and perhaps previous actual financial data to account or transaction level. The planning, consolidation and dashboard modules are built as detailed in the project plan. This might involve configuration of sales, personnel, expense, asset, project, operations and other planning input sheets, dashboard layouts incorporating required dimensions and measures, elimination and adjustments, balance sheet and incomes statement structures to support jurisdiction requirements etc. Versions may be developed to enable rolling forecasting or other approaches.
4. Reports
This phase might include designing simple budget versus forecast versus actual reports, perhaps including features like colour alerting, through to Board standard reporting packages that integrate nicely formatted incomes statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements etc with commentaries and are automated to run to Microsoft Office (formatted for Word, PowerPoint, Excel) or integrated with other Business Intelligence applications like Qlik.
5. UAT and Go Live
Finally we do User Acceptance Testing and move to production.
We scope the implementation by working our way through the scoping diagnostic, reviewing existing budget models and reports, and facilitating a rapid prototype. Migration and process improvement options are assessed. Key stakeholders and project team members are determined. A project plan is prepared.
2. Mobilisation
This typically involves initial administrator training, development of a change management plan and communication to all impacted people.
3. Build
This commences with import of the charts of accounts, organisational structures and perhaps previous actual financial data to account or transaction level. The planning, consolidation and dashboard modules are built as detailed in the project plan. This might involve configuration of sales, personnel, expense, asset, project, operations and other planning input sheets, dashboard layouts incorporating required dimensions and measures, elimination and adjustments, balance sheet and incomes statement structures to support jurisdiction requirements etc. Versions may be developed to enable rolling forecasting or other approaches.
4. Reports
This phase might include designing simple budget versus forecast versus actual reports, perhaps including features like colour alerting, through to Board standard reporting packages that integrate nicely formatted incomes statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements etc with commentaries and are automated to run to Microsoft Office (formatted for Word, PowerPoint, Excel) or integrated with other Business Intelligence applications like Qlik.
5. UAT and Go Live
Finally we do User Acceptance Testing and move to production.
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - Change management is typically a small part of the implementation and is usually easily handled. However this question depends on management intent.
If the intent is simply to migrate the existing budget models into Adaptive without modifying the planning methodologies than there is little change management needed. Input sheets can be configured to look and feel the way the old ones did. So can reports.
If however the intent is to drive substantive change by adopting alternate planning methodologies or to facilitate process improvement, cost reduction or more rigorous revenue planning approaches to enable a growth strategy, then to tool-set will enable those but obviously a more active change management approach is required.
If the intent is simply to migrate the existing budget models into Adaptive without modifying the planning methodologies than there is little change management needed. Input sheets can be configured to look and feel the way the old ones did. So can reports.
If however the intent is to drive substantive change by adopting alternate planning methodologies or to facilitate process improvement, cost reduction or more rigorous revenue planning approaches to enable a growth strategy, then to tool-set will enable those but obviously a more active change management approach is required.
- The only real challenge we have experienced has been when a third party services firm has been involved in the implementation and there intent is really to over complicate the implementation and to maximise their own fee opportunities.
Adaptive Suite Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
No - Adaptive Insights standard support services provide premium level uptime and response time money back guarantees.
We at ABM Systems provide clients with first level support services. Under standard support services we resolve client support requests promptly in alignment with our Service Level Agreement. In the minority of situations where we need to escalate issues to Adaptive Insights we find these requests are handled very promptly. Under our support agreements we provided additional services such as Health Checks to ensure users experience optimal product performance and are making the most of their investment.
We at ABM Systems provide clients with first level support services. Under standard support services we resolve client support requests promptly in alignment with our Service Level Agreement. In the minority of situations where we need to escalate issues to Adaptive Insights we find these requests are handled very promptly. Under our support agreements we provided additional services such as Health Checks to ensure users experience optimal product performance and are making the most of their investment.
Yes - Our bug report as dealt with promptly by the Adaptive support team. We were able to use a temporary work around as the issue was escalated internally, which resulted in the development of a patch. The patch was deployed immediately for all users, as all customers use the same Software As A Service Cloud (SaaS) platform.
Adaptive Insights has provided outstanding support to ABM Systems and to our many Adaptive Insights clients for over six years.
Examples of these range from method assistance requests, through to unexpected outcome investigation and formulae rectification, to model and sheet structure enhancement suggestions to better optimise solution response times when data volumes are exceedingly high.
Adaptive Insights has also been very receptive to our clients and our own product enhancement suggestions, incorporating many improvements that all users now benefit from.
Examples of these range from method assistance requests, through to unexpected outcome investigation and formulae rectification, to model and sheet structure enhancement suggestions to better optimise solution response times when data volumes are exceedingly high.
Adaptive Insights has also been very receptive to our clients and our own product enhancement suggestions, incorporating many improvements that all users now benefit from.