Workday Adaptive Planning - Avis

Customization, flexibility, value, security

Administration - learning to build and maintain the system is complex, but that is why the system is so powerful

Allows so many different ways to breakdown data.
Great customer support. The respond quickly and are very knowledgeable.
Easy to manage users with different access levels.
Adaptive is always working to enhance or update features. The platform develops continuously, which is great for the large user base.
Hosts free webinars every so often.
Can be accessed from anywhere as long as you have internet access.

The learning curve is steep, it takes a lot of time to really get comfortable with the platform.
Not a lot of video tutorials.
The terminology can be confusing sometimes.
Adaptive is open to technical/programming suggestions but often take time to be enacted. You sometimes have to wait for the next release to get the issue resolved.

Powerful - allows you to create custom reports, filter by various parameters, create different views
Reliable - Stable and does not crash
Light - Able to work through web interface which makes it a breeze even on thin clients
Compatible - with most browsers and does not have hangups

Interface - looks like 2 generations old. Very barebones and non intuitive
GUI - the design is extremely sloppy - and requires you to know your way through.
Lack of advanced functionality

- The software is a cloud based, so you will have access anywhere you have the internet.
- No more “this worksheet is locked by another user” message.
- Imports and Exports to/from excel seamlessly…for those of you that like to work out of excel.
- Dashboard capabilities for more real time department metrics and visibility to spend.
- Rolling forecasting capabilities that allow us as a company to focus more on the future and less on the past.
- Instant Company budget/forecast results.
- Audit trails…never have to worry who, what, or when someone changed a number you budgeted or forecasted. All changes will be tracked.
- Company-wide visibility to Personnel and Capex planning that drives the cost of benefits, IT equipment, and supplies.

- Software enhancements are only every 4 to 5 months.
- Levels (Organization Departments) can be restricting to planning across multiple departments
- Noting variances in a report can be tricky at times.

Workday makes it super easy to manage all aspects of my job from scheduling to time off and payment elections and tax withholdings anywhere at anytime.

The task workflow process seems a bit drawn out and unclear for some things. There are a lot of options that still appear even if not enabled by the administrators.

The best things about Adaptive Planning are its ability to integrate actuals and budgets/forecasts, its reporting capabilities, the fact that it's cloud based, and the ability to create complex financial models to track and report on business in a dynamic fashion.

The only issue our company has with Adaptive Planning is that our business model is very complex and hard to duplicate in the Adaptive model. That is not Adaptive's fault, but more so in the implementation and due to ever changing and more complex expectations from management.

I loved the user experience as a whole. The interface feels very modern and as easy to use.

I wish it had more functionalities to easily do project level budgeting.

Ease of implementation and use.

Still developing some modules, need time to improve

Various user groups can be built out to limit exposure to personnel information.

Certain sheets still use Java and this can slow things down.

The user-friendly interface, customization, regular updates and wealth of support and information. Reporting is also easy to use and very powerful. One of our main challenges is accurately planning and reporting our allocations. AI makes it easy.

There is nothing I dislike about this software but there are a few things to be aware of. Unless you have 2 people exclusively working full time to set up the instance it will take you much longer than you think. Allow yourself a few months to set it up and know that a full, complete roll-out will probably take a full budget cycle.

The best part of the software for me is the ability to quickly create reports based on any selected dimensions, levels, and timeframes. This is something that historically would have taken us a significant amount of time and is now done in minutes.

My least favorite parts about the software are the difficulty in navigating the data sheets and the inability to lock formulas and values in historical versions while updating formulas going forward. I would love to see greater functionality to search in data sheets by specific columns.

This suite of products have changed the way we inform our leadership of the state of our operations each month. We no longer spend days and days preparing dry financials. Now, we are generating useful statements in seconds along with instantaneously seeing that same financial and operational data visualized in Adaptive Discovery in our interactive scorecard. The ease of use, and the level of support are the two greatest things about Adaptive.

The tools do everything we ask of them, and more. The monthly load of data from our GL and the operational data from other source systems being a manual process is my ultimate least favorite thing. We are implementing the Adaptive Discovery connector so that the data will be loaded in the future at the push of a button. That should take care of it, though. I think if I had to identify my next least favorite thing it's probably the high bar that it sets for all of our other reporting from other systems.

The software behaves like a specialized version of Excel, however is limited in other areas that requires data to be exported into Excel to analyze more extensively.

The native reporting is not that easy to use, would prefer better canned reporting functionality.

everything- ease of use

none

Easy to gather, audit, and lock down inputs from key contributors. It was also very easy to create multiple versions and scenarios.

Struggled a little to get it to connect the way we wanted with our ERP, but that had to do with both sides. Not just Adaptive. It also does take a little time to understand how to build things out.

I have been in FP&A for for 5 years and have become somewhat versed in different systems and adaptive has been the best. Super fast updates with the ability to create different forecast scenarios.

Some of its features don't work on Macs, but otherwise nothing to serious here.

Pros: ease of use in that the software is cloud-based. It was also relatively easy to implement with approximately 50 users. Good customer support.

Cons: sometimes pages take too long to load, which is frustrating to users. But otherwise there are few complaints.

> Strong, secure environment - clearly developed with an appreciation of how to treat company sensitive data.
> Appropriate security levels are easily established and maintained.
> Cloud-based connectivity is the only way to go - AI does a nice job of leveraging this platform.

> Some effort is required for setup as programming keys are built on a one-by-one basis and thus training is essential for the new user.
> From an international perspective, the consolidation of multiple currency / FX data needs additional development.
> MS Office connectivity is too limited and the user is tempted to use other sw apps where integration is superior to AI architecture.

This is a solid software base that my firm uses to consolidate forecasting data and pull those forecasts for board review. It is a great platform to use for data warehousing and to pull massive subsets of data. Those pulls can then be used and pasted into Excel or whatever template that you need to generate the proper metrics.

The functionality is not as user friendly as you would like. The customized reporting is complex and hard to understand. I would recommend sitting in on a seminar or tutorial before committing to it. It isn't quite user friendly and, for us, we don't use it for anything but generating massive paste fills to be dumped into our reporting templates.

[1] Version comparison is easy for variance analysis
[2] Adaptive office connect is a very useful excel based reporting tool
[3] Flexible system based planning and scenario analysis accelerates planning cycles and reduces data integrity issues

The biggest issue that i have run into is the way actuals flow into locked plan versions.
If you have a formula in a locled plan version that references actuals and you change the actuals data, then it will change you plan numbers even though the period is locked.

Flexibility

It is easy-to-use so we don't need any expensive technical people to maintain it. Our management and finance team own the entire solution. It is also very scalable from small organisations to large multinational multi-billion dollar revenue organisations. Scalable in the context of - price, performance, functionality and integration.

A few months ago I would have said the reliance on Java, but that has now been removed. It's happy days for us Adaptive customers.

Good versioning and flexibility
Import/Export is simple
Easy to collaborate
Nice customization options

User interface is frustrating and dated
Lack of simple undo
Cell history should save information from prior versions

The ability to track payroll, depreciation, and other "sheets" to roll up in the data. Also, we load actuals from our G/L to help with forecasting. Overall, an awesome product.

Not to much to say here, but there are some complex formulas that need to be written at times. Need to be very careful the data is pulling from the proper sheets when creating a new version(s).