Workday Adaptive Planning - Avis

We're a large corporation with multiple lines of business. Our main goal was to simplify our annual budgeting process; to make it easier on the end users, give them ownership of their budgets and to cut down on the time it took to put the whole budget together. Adaptive exceeded those expectations.

Overall it's been great and I would highly recommend it.

Overall, Adaptive Insights has been a great software to work with. AI has increased the FP&A departments productivity during month end close and review by multiple days.

I have complete control over my data using this software.

Have been using Adaptive Planning since 2012 for two different companies. The software has steadily improved to handle most of the complexities of our business. The user interface is intuitive and the way it integrates actuals from our accounting software with various versions of forecasts and budgets is a huge timesaver. On top of that, data can be easily accessed through reports or an Office add in.

It's a great tool and it's meeting a lot of our deadlines for forcecasting. Saving valuable time and dollars.

Overall I am satisfied because Workday gave me all that I wanted to have in relation to my personal data or company data. Even thought it was hard at start to navigate and find my self in the tool but after some time it is a pure pressure to work with Workday data.

We have been using Adaptive Insights for over 4 years. So far we are a happy camper. We are happy with our investment and choice. Adaptive greatly cut down our time in deploying and completing our annual budgets.

Our company has used Adaptive Planning for about 2 years now. We went from a complex Excel spreadsheet based system to an organized and efficient Adaptive budgeting process. The customization and flexibility in the system is almost limitless and impressive.

I use Adaptive as a replacement for excel in some aspects of my job. I mainly use it as month end communication to send out financial status reports pertaining to actuals vs budget vs forecast. Adaptive Discovery is one tool I utilize to aid in visualizing data in multiple ways through the use of graphs, gauges, pie charts, tables, and many more.

When I started in my role as Manager of FP&A with an agricultural inputs company, one of my first tasks was to move our planning and forecasting processes away from Excel workbooks. Trying to manage P&L's for 200+ retail locations and departments, combined with nearly 2,000 employees, during a high-growth period proved to be challenging, to say the least.

Adaptive Planning has streamlined our planning and forecasting cycles and helped us to standardize metrics, reporting and analysis. Through the use of multiple versions, we have the ability to compare plans, forecasts and actuals across the organization.

My only regret related to Adaptive Planning was the timing of our implementation. We started our implementation in late-July and finished in October, which coincided with our annual planning cycle. We survived, but I would not recommend this timeline!

Pros:
1) Implementation was relatively quick (even though we implemented during our annual planning cycle).
2) Affordability compared to other SAAS and on-site alternatives.
3) Flexibility allows us to mold portions of the product to our needs.
4) Customer support is excellent and timely.
5) Tool can be maintained by Finance; IT involvement is not required for installation or maintenance.
6) Ongoing product enhancements continue to improve this product.
7) Office Connect allows for creation of templates in Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Updating with current results is a simple refresh button-click.
8) Attributes and dimensions allow for unlimited slicing/dicing of organizational data.

Cons:
1) Only a single organization structure is currently available in a single-instance installation. This has caused some headaches, especially in the window of year-end close and progressing into a different organization structure in the new year. We have worked around this issue by utilizing level attributes to view our data in multiple structures.
2) The reporting side of the tool could be improved, including automating linkage to standard distribution/reporting platforms. For example, we use SharePoint for distribution of standard reports, but publishing reports from Adaptive to SharePoint is currently a manual process.

Our Budgeting and Forecast process has significantly improved and can be identified through the additional value added to each of our departments through customized, timely, accurate and flexible reporting. Additionally our Financial Analysts (system end users) have increased their capacity to provide more in-depth timely analysis to the organization and their support department especially with the drill down capabilities and customizing reports.

We use Adaptive Planning as our primary Budgeting and Forecasting system. Many of the functions are intuitive, but requires some time to get comfortable with the many functions that are available. I would not recommend the native reports, as they are difficult to generate quickly and easily without formal training. But their Office Connect add on tool is a nice enhancement to have to generate more custom reporting and also provides some degree of automation once the linked cells are set up properly.

Although it takes some dedicated time and experience to set this product up I would say it is the top time saving piece of software I have ever used. I was able to setup our company plan with limited assistance from Adaptive. The assistance I did receive was top notch and always available with short advance notice. I opted to use a Adaptive consultant and deal with her on the phone.
The product has been nothing but a time saver. It pays for itself many times over on a monthly basis. Being a startup I am constantly running new spins and versions of the budget and there is no way I could run as many scenarios using just excel. Days worth of work are reduced to hours. Like I said, it pays for itself many times over. I currently run a static budget and forecast on a monthly basis. I also run a one year rolling forecast that I will easily roll into my 2017 budget at year end. I would not hesitate to recommend this product to any of my fellow finance professionals.

I've been using Adaptive since 2011, and I am fully satisfied with the Adaptive suit. Every year they are improving and developing the suit of services and product. I might be biased but the ease of use of the platform is really what's important for me. The flow and transparency of the data is equally important. I don't think I could be as good as I am when it comes to FP&A and reporting if it wasn't for using Adaptive.

An excellent tool for budgeting once you have put in the time to learn to use it, you always have the feeling there is more to the software than you know how to use.

We chose Adaptive over competitors because it's in the cloud, it's customizable, and the price was right. It has improved every aspect of the FP&A function within our company. Our budgeting cycles are shorter, our data is more reliable, and analysis and reporting are more real time.

FP&A responsibilities - specifically budgeting and forecasting but also building out models and creating new versions for our analysts to use.

We implemented 20 customers using Cognos, Oracle and SAP. Adaptive was a huge discovery for us. Is an amazing solution. The best for all parties is that Adaptive is really administered for Finance people despite other software.

I use adaptive planning for corporate budgeting and long term forecasting. It is a great tool that is very flexible. Being able to build the financial model in a collaborative, team based manner instead of in numerous different excel models is a much better process.