Adaptive Insights Suite is powerful and easy to use!
October 24, 2017
Adaptive Insights Suite is powerful and easy to use!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adaptive Suite
We use Adaptive Planning to forecast personnel, capital, and operating expenses. We use a product by Adaptive called OfficeConnect as our primary reporting tool in FP&A. We import actuals data from our Oracle GL into Adaptive on a daily basis (or more frequently as needed) and we produce P&L reports for our management team that contain historical results and projections. The software is used by approximately 50 people at my company.
- It's very easy to import financial data from Oracle. We import values and transaction-level details. The import (called a connector) runs every morning but we can run it on demand. The import only takes about 10 minutes to complete.
- Adaptive launched a new reporting tool called OfficeConnect a couple of years ago. We use OfficeConnect Excel and OfficeConnect Powerpoint for nearly all of our reporting. It's very easy to build and maintain reports in this tool. Additionally, updating the Board Book each quarter can be accomplished very quickly since most of the content for the presentation is linked to Adaptive OfficeConnect excel reports.
- It's easy to train new users on how to use Adaptive Planning. The input sheets look like an excel file and it's fairly intuitive to use. Our users enjoy being able to use one tool to access historical and forward looking data and to run their own reports. They don't need to access Oracle to conduct research since it's all available in Adaptive.
- Adaptive frequently releases software updates. I would like to see the company offer improved training on new features. Even though Adaptive holds a webinar following each release, it's very fast-paced and high-level and I don't learn much about the new functionality. It would be helpful if Adaptive could hold several webinars when rolling out updates, with each one focusing on just one of their products so that they could do a deeper dive on the enhancements.
- While I very much enjoy the reporting enhancements offered with OfficeConnect, it's very easy for your spreadsheet to go sideways, meaning your rows suddenly become misaligned and the report becomes unusable. When this happens, it would be nice if the 'undo' option actually worked, but it generally doesn't. More often than not, it's faster to re-create a report from scratch rather than to try to repair a broken spreadsheet.
- When working in Excel OfficeConnect, it's very frustrating to only have one spreadsheet open at a time. This isn't how most users utilize Excel. I would like the ability to work on multiple files simultaneously.
- Adaptive offers plenty of flexibility with what-if scenario modeling. It's very easy to save different versions of the plan/forecast and to control access rights to the versions. It's possible to hide versions from all users or to set them as read only.
- Adaptive makes month end variance analysis very straightforward. Comparing actuals with budget/forecast is quite simple and efficient. It's easy to do a high-level comparison and then to do a deep dive where needed. Also, the budget managers can perform their own reviews simultaneously.
- We've been using the software for 5 years and our budget/forecast cycles change all of the time. Adaptive offers the flexibility needed to create rolling forecasts that extend out several years. However, I wish that it was easier to roll forward historical results into future periods - there's a mix of actual/budget data that gets rolled forward and there's a lot of editing required to arrive at a baseline budget.
When going through due-diligence last summer, there were numerous ad-hoc data requests that were all time-sensitive. My colleague and I were able to slice and dice the actuals/forecast/plan data to meet every reporting requirement. Adaptive OfficeConnect for Excel was very powerful and enabled my FP&A colleague and I to build reports and adapt existing reports very quickly; we didn't have to rely on anyone from our IT division or from our Accounting team to assist us.
Migrating from Essbase to the Adaptive Suite has transformed my role. I can create very detailed budgets/forecasts, easily perform flux/variance analyses and budget managers now have the ability to run their own budget/forecast vs actual reports at month/quarter end. As a result of the improved efficiency, I can focus my efforts on analyzing results, improving forecast accuracy and creating more meaningful forecast/board decks for our CFO.