Workday Adaptive Planning Reviews

We are going into our third budget cycle using Adaptive and it has made our process much more efficient. Prior to using Adaptive we played budget ping pong, bouncing spreadsheets back and forth and then once we landed on a final version the Finance team consolidated the numbers. Adaptive is great because you can see the impact of a change to the consolidated budget in real time. This is a great software for the Finance team as well as the budget / business managers.

Quite effective but very sloppy interface for getting financials. The design is decades old and seems frustratingly under developed. The reporting is there but it does not have advanced functionality that you would expect from such a pricey product.

My overall experience was great, I also like to plan events and very special work days

While the core features are strong, some advanced functionalities may require additional customization or integration with other Workday products.
8/10

Using Adaptive is a great experience! It's easy to learn, and once you try it, you will love it. I can forecast monthly , quarterly or whenever I like. Because my operational metrics, which drive our revenues and expenses, are also in Adaptive, I feel we get closer to our actual's each month. We have simplified our monthly reporting process from 6 days, to about an hour and a half. That extra time can be used to analyze the data, which is much more rewarding than ticking and tying numbers to a report. Our dashboard is solid and tells a story for our leaders. I love it!

We plan at a very granular level, and Adaptive's formulas and overall approach to modeling has made this tool a pleasure to work with. Like any new tool, it took our team a little bit of time (~3 months) of getting used to it, but this is simply a tool we can't live without now.

In addition to the feature set, the customer support is outstanding. Very responsive to questions and highly knowledgeable on a variety of topics.

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.

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

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.

It has been good, however need to bring in drastic changes to compete in market

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.

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've been using Adaptive Planning for 4 years and at 2 employers. The software has not only improved the accuracy and accountability of our budgeting, forecasting and reporting, but has saved thousands of hours of time.

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.

I have previous experience using Hyperion, Peoplesoft, and Microsoft Excel to create and maintain financial models. As flexible as regular spreadsheets are, it was always hard to get everybody on the same page, referencing the same numbers, using the same version. I have been using Adaptive Planning for about 1.5 years now, with about 1 year as a systems administrator for the product. FP&A has truly become simplified. This tool has saved hours upon hours every month, as well improved accuracy and timeliness of reports. This allows us to function better as a business unit, and make more proactive models and decisions. My one gripe with Adaptive is their customer support. I have had a hard time getting several issues resolved in a timely manner. Nonetheless, I would highly recommend Adaptive to anybody stuck in "spreadsheet land"--there really is a better way.

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.

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.

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.

It's a great tool for managing datasets via your browser. Downloading enormous datasets for changing only one or two things just to upload it all again it's a big pain that Adaptive saves you from.

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.

Adaptive Discovery is changing the way we communicate finances to our leadership. They have traditionally received their monthly reports containing scads of numbers. I could see their eye's glaze over at times and they often asked, "so is this good or bad", or, how does this compare with such and such a month, or how does this number compare across the other stores? Now, they have a visual representation which they can drill into and can see trends developing before their eyes. They can see at a glance if something is outside a control limit, needing their attention, or can see at a glance if things are within guidelines or reaching goals we have set. I would love to be able to be able to zoom in when differences are small by changing the scale settings on the axis'. I love this product! It is making my life easier!

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.