Item: Workday Adaptive Planning
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Workday Adaptive Planning is mostly used by our finance team. However we expanded it to accounting, the data BI team, investor relations, and budget owners. Finance uses it for its typical duties: balance sheet and income statement forecast, OPEX variances, headcount and req tracking, close and board meeting dashboards etc. Accounting uses it to view financial statements on the fly from different angles (by function, by location, department, etc.). The BI team pulls data to create advanced dashboards on their end. Budget owners can view their vendor forecast and spend, view their headcount, reqs, etc.

Pros and Cons

Ease of administration (one or two people can handle it versus a whole team plus IT)
Keep adding really cool features every quarter
Integration with Workday HCM
Integration and customization with ERPs, data warehouses, CRMs
Great customer support--very knowledgeable, efficient, friendly, and fast
Approachable staff--you can reach out easily to PMs and provide and get feedback
Office Connect became dynamic (updates of structure, drills, grouping, exclusions, etc.)
Data mapping feature to overlay or fix mappings from feeding sources

Small bugs after new releases (but always solved very fast)
Could use some enhancement on UI side (but they have great improvements on the roadmap)
Copy to or from sandbox is done via request to support; it would be great to have an automated, on-demand way by admins

Return on Investment

Leveraging dashboards to drastically reduce time to prepare close meeting slides
Give more ownership to budget holders

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Workday Adaptive Planning again?

Yes

Usability

Ease of Administration
Reporting is more and more dynamic and customizable
Possibility to write more and more complex/advanced formulas for better forecasting

Support Rating

Amazing support. I love them. They are super efficient, very knowledgeable, fast, and friendly.

Other Software Used

Tray.io, CaptivateIQ, Coupa

Likelihood to Recommend

I have been a user, then an admin, and then implementor of Workday Adaptive Planning. Some people are still stuck in an Excel mindset and can find it cumbersome in the beginning, but once they grasp the logic of Workday Adaptive Planning, they start to appreciate the ease of adding new data, adding new dimensions to slice and dice data better, and generating reports and dashboards super fast. It will make headcount and OPEX variance analysis way easier. You can create all kinds of dashboards for all kinds of audiences (non-finance people, budget owners, board, execs, HR, accounting, etc.). You can even set up separate instances for advanced revenue forecasting and advanced sales commissions planning. Integration with Workday HCM makes the whole headcount recon process a breeze (from a budgeted request to a hired employee). I'd conclude by saying that to get optimal results, advanced training of users and admins is the key.

Easy to set up/maintain and amazing outputs!

Overall Satisfaction with Workday Adaptive Planning