Excellent Planning and Analytics Tool.
February 07, 2024

Excellent Planning and Analytics Tool.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Workday Adaptive Planning

We use Workday Adaptive Planning for our budgets and forecasts that end up back in Workday Finance. We also integrate Actuals from Workday Finance, HCM, and other software to create comprehensive analytics and reports.
  • Better than Excel for multi-faceted planning.
  • Allows real-time collaboration, analytics, and reporting.
  • Gives power users the flexibility to create their own planning models.
  • Allows integration of multiple different data sources.
  • Web reports and sheets are not great for in-depth reporting, and require the use of the OfficeConnect for Excel plugin and, therefore, the use of Excel for extensive reporting capabilities.
  • It has limited formula functionality in some instances, requiring again the use of OfficeConnect for Excel for extensive calculations.
  • I would like to see new planning sheet types or upgrades to existing sheet types; functionality has been the same for over 10 years.
  • Budgets take days instead of months to create.
  • Constant forecasting was a possibility when it wasn't before.
  • Drilling into the data and finding variances is much easier.
We are collaborating with multiple departments to automatically integrate their data into Adaptive to enhance our budgeting processes. This requires some process changes, but it lets the data owners know they are the source of the data in Adaptive instead of them wondering where we got their data from or why it may differ from what they see.
It is overwhelming at first, but once you really get to know it, you realize it is fairly simple and customizable, and then it has a lot more limitations than you first thought. Realizing those limitations and finding workarounds is when you know you've mastered the software.

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?

No

Did implementation of Workday Adaptive Planning go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Workday Adaptive Planning again?

Yes

Adaptive is much more versatile than most planning software, and in most ways better than Excel for planning and analytics. It is great and bringing together data from multiple sources, especially if on the Workday platform, and really allows your team to collaborate in real time without any issues unlike trying to work in Excel workbooks at the same time or needing an adminstrator to enter data for you. Power users can even update models and reports themselves and share with others. The flexibility of designing your own models is also great in allowing you to plan however granular you need and have different methods of planning for different business units but bring it all together consolidated.The reporting is the least useful feature. Yes, OfficeConnect gives you all the power of Excel and PowerPoint and is great if you can utilize it, but for now it only works on Windows when many businesses have shifted to Apple or Google platforms. Also, OfficeConnect is not fast or easy to use, like the web reports and web dashboards, which are great for quick ad-hoc reports but not great for presentation-level reports. This creates a huge disconnect in the quickness of analytics, if you want to run and show in depth analytics you'll need OfficeConnect due to the limited functionality and limited formula capabilites of Adaptive web reports which requires someone to build and maintain and refresh the OfficeConnect reports which is slow and not easily shared with other users.Also the planning functionality of the 3 sheet types have not been updated in years. Some new features or sheet types would be greatly appreciated.

Workday Adaptive Planning Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
9
Financial budgeting
9
Forecasting
9
Scenario modeling
9
Management reporting
7
Financial data consolidation
7
Journal entries and reports
3
Multi-currency management
5
Intercompany Eliminations
5
Minority Ownership
4
Local and consolidated reporting
5
Detailed Audit Trails
5
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
7
Excel-based Reporting
10
Automated board and financial reporting
6
Personalized dashboards
8
Color-coded scorecards
8
KPIs
8
Cost and profitability analysis
8
Key Performance Indicator setting
8
Benchmarking with external data
6
Flat file integration
9
Excel data integration
9
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
9