Workday Adaptive Planning – It’s Versatile!
Updated February 26, 2024
Workday Adaptive Planning – It’s Versatile!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Workday Adaptive Planning
We use Workday Adaptive Planning for budget and forecast planning, reporting (utilizing both web and office connect excel reports), and analytics. The system is primarily used by finance now, until we role it out to other departments in our business; which we’ve already begun to do. With Workday Adaptive Planning we are able to compile large amounts of data from the bottoms up but also have the flexibility of modeling at a high level. The system is versatile and can be used for not only financials, but headcount, and performance data as well.
- Creation of Versions.
- Reporting and Dashboarding.
- Model Flexibility.
- Web reports within Dashboard would be great.
- Version to Version referencing within model formulas.
- Calculations within reports that allow you to add data across different versions.
- Streamlined planning process.
- Reduced time in reporting through automation.
- The ability to create versions.
I have not used these tools in depth. AI and ML are two areas that Workday is focusing a lot on in the past releases of new functionality. I think our organization will start to use them in the near future. We expect that the tools will help catch errors and improve our review.
Workday Adaptive Planning is centrally used in FP&A at this time. Therefore it hasn't hit many business processes outside of finance. As it relates to finance, Adaptive has helped improve processes around inputting data and reporting on that data efficiently for both budgets and forecasts. The review process for reporting and forecasting has also greatly improved.
I haven't used a separate planning tool in great depth like Adaptive. Our company used Host Analytics prior to Adaptive but I didn't have a lot of experience with it. The other software I've used for planning is Excel. Excel is obviously capable of a lot of complex lookups and calculations but it comes with plently of limitations.
Do you think Workday Adaptive Planning delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Workday Adaptive Planning's feature set?
Yes
Did Workday Adaptive Planning live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Workday Adaptive Planning go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Workday Adaptive Planning again?
Yes
Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings
Planning, Alignment, and Use
We focus on a centralized planning team, so others outside of finance don't use Adaptive. I believe Adaptive has great tools to allow enterprise-wide planning, but I can't speak on how well it works. The tools we use for workforce, revenue, and operational planning do work really well for our purposes.
We perform a monthly reforecast using Adaptive and it works well for our strategy. We generate the forecast using different types of sheets and at times use planning dashboards to streamline that process. We are then able to publish the plans to workday to allow those forecasts to reach the business.
We used Miscrosoft Excel prior to Adaptive Planning. The transition has improved our processes massively. We're able to plan TOGETHER instead of in silos. This makes it easier to communicate on the same page. The reporting functionality has been hugely impacted as well. It takes a matter of minutes to generate a deck where it took hours prior to having Adaptive.
Using Workday Adaptive Planning
25 - Operations, Back Office, Maintenance, Supply Chain, Revenue
2 - Data-driven, problem-solver, general curiosity about finance systems, accounting and finance knowledge base are all valuable skill sets to keep in mind when supporting Adaptive.
- Using the tool to be able to generate ad-hoc forecasts and plans
- Using Adaptive for monthly reporting and budget deck preparation
- Ability to generate flexible plans and change assumptions on the fly if needed
- We've started to use it to generate a statement of cash flow
- We use it to store a lot of our debt information to feed reporting and our plan
- We've utilized dimensionality in unique ways to assist in easy planning/maintenance
- Forecasted Cash Flow
- Improved Tracking of CapEx
- More in depth modeling of Personnel
Workday Adaptive Planning Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - We learned that extra communication about the changes that were taking place was necessary. With all of our department keeping very busy, it was essential to take extra steps to make sure the changes taking place were understood by all.
- Integrating the data with Workday was time-consuming simply based on how different the two systems were at the time of our implementation.
- Recognizing that some of our Workday data was messy made it difficult to complete work timely.
- Integrating with large databases ended up failing because it was slowing down Adaptive. Adaptive planners will tell you that Adaptive is a planning tool, not a database.
Workday Adaptive Planning Support
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
We did not purchase premium support. The support we receive from the Adaptive support team has been solid!
I won't list any specific examples, but generally when I reach out to support they do a great job of doing research if they don't know the answer off-hand. I always feel valued when reaching out to support and the service has been fantastic.
Integrating Workday Adaptive Planning
- Workday
- RAMCO
- Sabre
- Adaptive
- Spreadsheets
The integration of Workday to Adaptive and vice versa was straight-forward to set up through Adaptive's user-friendly interface. It took careful following of documentation produced by Workday. The Workday integration was setup and owned by finance which allows us to easily make changes as needed. RAMCO and Sabre required the help of our IT integration group, but from an Adaptive set up perspective it was still owned by finance. We also user boomerang logic to have the Adaptive integration bring in data from Adaptive and then send it back in. Lastly we use spreadsheets to upload data to the integration. Both Adaptive and spreadsheet data sources were easy to achieve.
- PowerBI
To my knowledge, PowerBI is not supported.
- File import/export
- Single Signon
- API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
- Javascript widgets
- ETL tools
To my knowledge, the list is complete.
From the perspective of a person with finance and accounting background, my advice would be to not get freaked out when hearing the word integration if you're going to be someone who helps manage this product (assuming you purchase it). The integration framework is logical and makes sense. Building out tables and loaders actually become an enjoyable task after you have the data connection working as it should. Have fun with it!