Adaptive, Collaborative, Innovative, Positive!
October 17, 2017
Adaptive, Collaborative, Innovative, Positive!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Insights
I was a previous user/admin of Adaptive planning for about 4 years. My current company that I recently joined decided to take the plunge on a CPM system. I will be updating this review at different intervals as we go through the life cycle of using Adaptive. The main use case is to move off of spreadsheets and into a holistic "last mile of finance" approach (reporting, analysis, budgeting, and consolidation).
- Self Service - the ability to allow users to enter their budgets into simple online spreadsheets. Also the ability to utilize the Excel add-in for those who want to download the online spreadsheets and create offline budgets and then resubmit them back into adaptive.
- Ease of administration - Finance can solely own this system, not necessary for IT to be involved, although it helps to have a technical finance resource who understands data modeling.
- Reporting - with several ways to extract data (online report, office connect, Excel add-in, and discovery) you have access to all types of data views that are simply given to you at a click of the button. I am able to reproduce accounting ledger results quicker then the accounting team can refresh their Management Reporter reports (for those who use Dynamics GP/SL/AX, you know what I mean).
- Accessibility - I'm able to access adaptive at home, office, and even when I'm mobile. I would go into meetings with an executive with adaptive on my phone with certain drill downs already loaded, so when they asked me a specific question I could easily answer.
- Collaboration - Adaptive really allows you to collaborate and communicate with your users in different ways. They are able to "communicate" to you with report notes, cell notes, row splits and you can communicate with them through the task manager. No more meetings to ask "what did you change or what is in this number.
- Consolidations - while we didn't purchase the consolidation platform, it was something we evaluated and at the time it wasn't up to par with some of the other competitors for certain use cases. I know they are advancing in this areas however.
- Standard Sheets vs. Cubes Sheets - with more and more accounting systems adding dimensionality I can see the standard sheets having limited lifespan, would like the Cube Sheets to be able to do inline splits, which I think is the best (and perhaps only reason) to use the Standard Sheets, however you lose the dimensionality if you use standard sheets.
- Reporting/Discovery graphics - not a huge fan of how the reports and discovery graphics look on screen. Would like to see some Tableau/Qlickview like improvement in this area. The colors and graphics sometimes look dated/choppy and definitely not as clean as other BI tools. Definitely have seen improvement in this area over the past 2-3 years but more is needed.
- Easily will save 75% of finance team time on budgeting and planning.
- Improved cost control, budgets, and forecasts are at the users' finger tips with actuals vs. budget vs forecast. No excuses to overspend and allows finance to be better business partners.
Adaptive Suite gave us what we needed and fit our use case perfectly. We did short list Host Analytics and they were neck and neck with Adaptive and it was a win/win for us and we would have been successful with either tool. My familiarity with Adaptive, the simplicity of self implementation, the product vision,and the turn around time to get the company up and running made gave Adaptive the edge.
Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings
Evaluating Adaptive Insights and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Analyst Reports
- Third-party Reviews
Familiarity with the product and Analyst Reports were key to us making the evaluation, as we started with analyst reports to give us the list of vendors we wanted to demo. Trust Radius user reports also came in hand and I was able to reach out to the community to fill in the gaps on personal experiences for products.
I think we had a good evaluation and selection process. It's always about being clear and precise with the vendors so they can scope properly and also ensure sales and the demo team are joined up and producing what you want from your use case. If you're not clear on something then ask. Time should not be a constraint and if they say "yes we can do this" tell them to show you.
Using Adaptive Insights
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | Lots to learn |
- Administrative tasks
- Report building
- Using the budget input sheets
- version control
- discovery tools
- some flakiness with initial setup of integrations
Yes - mobile interface works well, it's what techy people call "responsive", meaning it knows how to display correctly when on mobile devices. The reports are the main areas of use here and they work well to look up data on the go. Obviously doing other tasks can be done but on a small screen it can be cumbersome.