Effective forecasting with Workday Adaptive Planning

Cloud-based financial planning tools can help solve the 'classic' challenges. But Workday Adaptive Planning is not 'just' a smart system. 

The platform is a catalyst for an effective and value-creating approach to financial planning. And Workday Adaptive Planning can support your finance function's planning and analysis team in living up to its purpose – namely to deliver quality work that elevates the overall business. 

Furthermore, the cloud-based platform is an agile alternative to the 'heavier' systems on the market and a great solution for companies looking to move beyond Excel-based planning processes.  

Workday Adaptive Planning is a leading platform within cloud-based FP&A. There are several reasons for this, but here are the three most important:  

• The planning tool supports the business with flexible and intuitive processes that can be adapted to both market conditions and business strategies. In short – a system you can develop to suit your needs.  
• Agility is at the heart of Workday. By planning, implementing and analysing in one system, not only is the time from start to action minimised; errors are reduced as well.  
• Workday can easily be adopted by all users at all levels of the organisation. From super users to those who contribute data and those who pull the reports. 

And if we were to list five benefits you get without customising the system, we could mention:  

• Business contributors can provide input directly in the system.  
• Multiple users can work in the system simultaneously, and you get a single source of truth. 
• You get real-time data in all reporting following data updates. 
• The platform has a database structure, which provides increased data quality and a focus on analysis rather than controlling data quality.  
• You get the ability to easily carry out scenario analysis and data versioning.  

When you partner with us, we won't just sell you a system – but a solution you can be confident suits your company's needs both now and in the future.  

We can promise that, as our approach to a Workday implementation is built around a Proof of Concept (PoC) approach that is agile and involves extensive user testing.  

This means that before you enter into a licence agreement with Workday Adaptive Planning, the first phase is a PoC dedicated to getting the key employees who will be working in the system to have it in their hands and test the functionality. A phase that typically lasts one to two months. 

In practical terms, the PoC is a closed test environment in Workday Adaptive Planning that we have built around critical functionality we have identified together with you, and which the platform must be able to accommodate. You therefore get the opportunity to assess whether Workday can create business value for you, based on the hands-on experience you gain through user testing.  

In this way, the PoC serves both as an important foundation for the subsequent implementation and as your assurance that the platform can do what you need it to.  

Following this, the implementation will take one to two months and will primarily consist of mapping critical functionality.  

The advantage of this approach is that the process is not drawn out, and that the iterative process makes room for new requirements to be incorporated – along with any learnings we pick up along the way.