Item: Workday Adaptive Planning
Rating: 10
Author: Warren Sampson

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Workday Adaptive Planning to create a detailed financial plan for our entire company. The userbase includes Sales, Operations, Finance, and HR. In addition to using Adaptive to develop a bottoms-up financial plan, starting with sales volume/revenue, detailed labor planning, cost of goods sold modeling, we use Adaptive to pull financial results from our ERP system (SAP) and report on Plan vs Actual performance.

Pros and Cons

Version Management. Adaptive lets us manage many versions/scenarios all in one platform with the robust ability to compare them to each other.
Processing Performance. With the Elastic Hypercube technology that was implemented a few years back, we can watch changes flow through a complex web of formulas and arrive at an answer within seconds.
Audit Trail. Our administrators love the ability to see and report on who made what changes when, which leads to real accountability within the organization.

Variable Time Roll-ups. Different entities within our company look at "years" differently, but we're only able to specify one global time roll-up for aggregating data quickly, which can lead to some confusion.
Administrative UI. Management of Access Rules and ordering sheets from an administrative point of view can be a bit tedious and have received less attention than other features recently.
List Sheet Reporting. Any sheet that is a variable list of things (like People, Capital Projects, Marketing Programs) is somewhat constrained in how it can be reported on. Adaptive provides two kinds of reports but both leave something to be desired when reporting on this kind of data.

Return on Investment

It's facilitated a better financial literacy and management by the non-financial managers in the company, giving them a much better ability to see what they're spending, control it, and plan better in the future.
It's hard to quantify the ease of model and version management, but we could never do what we're doing now with our current staff. It would take a small army to replicate anything close to what Adaptive pulls off using Excel, if it's even possible.

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?

Yes

Would you buy Workday Adaptive Planning again?

Yes

Usability

From a modeling perspective, Workday Adaptive Planning is very flexible and easy to manage. Generating new models, modifying existing models, renaming accounts without the model melting down; these are all very usable. We find that there's a bit of a learning curve for our user community in navigating some of the sheets, but once they get a feel for the options and how to pivot around their data a world of possibilities is unlocked.

Support Rating

We get strong and timely support when a ticket arises. The team that helps us is friendly and responsive.

Alternatives Considered

Solver BI360

The only alternative we looked at was BI360, and there really is no comparison. The choice was easy to go with Adaptive. We strongly wanted to move away from working with Excel spreadsheets, which was apparently a selling point of BI360. It was clear to us that the stability of the platform, and the ability to plan in real-time with others working in the same sheets was much stronger in Adaptive.

Other Software Used

Domo, SAP S/4HANA, Smartsheet

Likelihood to Recommend

Workday Adaptive Planning is an extremely flexible foundation to model almost anything. We've found ways to build detailed models that give the planners and management at the company valuable insights into how each department is planning for the future, thus providing management the information they need to shift course if necessary. Generally its reporting is robust but it's not a substitute for Business Intelligence tool.

Workday Adaptive Planning provides a strong foundation for agile planning

Overall Satisfaction with Workday Adaptive Planning