Item: Workday Adaptive Planning
Rating: 10
Author: Jack Kersjes

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for financial statements, budgeting, forecasting, and other operational reporting. We also use the dashboard for both financial and operational data. It is used by our executives and all our department directors. It has greatly streamlined our budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting processes. Additionally, the dashboard provides a means to communicate KPIs in an efficient manner.

Pros and Cons

Financial Reporting - financial statements are done instantaneously once the books are closed. There is no processing required. Recipients of the reports can obtain everything they need self-service. There is no distribution process required.
Budgeting/forecasting - We converted our Excel process (which used 30 linked workbooks, 20 sheets each, and 50+ formulas each sheet, for a total of 30,000 formulas) to Adaptive. Now that the model is set up, new forecasts can be set up in minutes, rather than hours/days. The whole model is driver-based and easy to manage. It is much more intuitive for our directors, too. All they need to supply are updated drivers to run a new budget or forecast.
Dashboard - We now have a company-wide mechanism for communicating KPIs, and both financial and non-financial data. Data can be presented both visually or in numeric formats.

The Adaptive Planning portion of the suite is very mature and has few short-comings. The biggest improvement I can think of is the ability for formulas to cross versions.
The Adaptive Discovery (dashboard) portion of the suite is much less mature. There are many chart types not available that are in Excel. For example, I would like to have an X-Y scatter chart to use. Also, some of the dial (chart) types have very little formatting options (like pie charts).
While the object of the web-based product is to eliminate paper printing, there are times when it is necessary to print financial statements. It would be nice to print directly to pdf with the ability to format the reports.

Return on Investment

Cycle time for processing financial statements, budgets, and forecasts are greatly reduced.
Visibility of company metrics and drivers has been increased across the company.
The ease and ability to quickly create multiple forecasts using different scenarios is now available.

Usability

My rating of 9 is really a composite of two ratings. For the users, I would give it a 10. But for administrators, I would give it more of an 8. That is because there is definitely a learning curve for the admins. It has a fair level of complexity (which is necessary), especially in the formulas and certain types of sheets. It is a product worth mastering, but it does take time to learn.

Alternatives Considered

We did not go through a full-blown software selection process, nor have I used other products in the past. Previous to Adaptive, we used Management Reporter (formerly FRx, now part of Microsoft Dynamics GP) for our financial statements, and Excel for our budgeting. Adaptive is far superior to either of those.

We pursued Adaptive mainly through word of mouth. When discussing the availability of products with other accounting professionals, it was clear Adaptive was becoming the industry leader for our company size. We had a demo of the product presented by them. Since we liked it so much, we decided to go with them even though we had not reviewed other products.

Likelihood to Recommend

Adaptive is well suited to present data (both financial and non-financial) in the form of financial statements, reports, budgets, forecasts, and dashboards to a distributed audience. That is, any data that can be accessed, and then summarized and presented for analytical and reporting purposes. The web-based platform allows for end-user access anywhere.

Where it is less appropriate, and often mistakenly so by those not directly involved in administering the product, is to try to use it as a replacement for an operational database and operational report writer. For example, in a SQL database, it would be better to write operating level reports directly in that database as SQL reports.

Products Replaced

Yes - We use Adaptive Insights for all of our financial statement output. It replaced Management Reporter (formerly FRx), which is now part of the Microsoft Dynamics GP suite. Using AI for financial statements is far superior for speed, ease of use, and ease of distribution. For the budgeting and planning cycle, AI replaced about 30 linked Excel workbooks, each averaging 20 sheets, each sheet averaging 50 formulas (that muliplies out to 30,000 formulas!). Needless to say, budgeting in Excel was no longer feasible for our organization.

Key Differentiators

Product Usability
Product Reputation
Third-party Reviews

We did all of our reviews on-line and word-of-mouth. We did not do any other formal vendor demonstrations other than Adaptive Insights. Based on our research, it was already clear to us that AI was rising to the top of the small to mid-size FP&A market. It had the highest customer satisfaction scores and usability ratings. Based on that, we opted to only view AI and, unless we did not like what we saw, would continue with them.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

We have been using it about two years now and everything is working as expected, and we are very happy with it. I would give it my highest recommendation. Given our success with the product, I have no regrets as to how we did the evaluation and selection process, and would not change anything. So much product and customer satisfaction information is available online now (such as this site), that it greatly streamlines the process. The "sales pitch" does not supply objective information, as they all say they have the best product. If I were in the market for another kind of product, I would do the search in the same way.

CareStar recommends Adaptive Insights for reporting and dashboards

Overall Satisfaction with Workday Adaptive Planning