Workday Adaptive Planning Overview
Introduction
Looking for a new way to plan?
Workday aims to fill this need with their cloud-based solution Adaptive Planning.
The goal of producing timely reporting can be painful for the teams and individuals that often scramble to bring together supporting data while still being expected to put critical thought into what the near and long term future looks like for their organization. Adaptive intends to synchronize diverse data formats from multiple systems into a curated environment that produces self-service reporting.
What Is Workday Adaptive Planning?
Workday Adaptive Planning is a cloud-based tool that allows users to produce consolidated forecasting plans in an environment that is designed to have intuitive user-interfaces and scalable functionality. Its strengths include the ability to merge data from multiple exterior systems, a do-it-yourself reporting interface, and the ability to support a decentralized planning process where individuals as well as teams can work off a common set of elements to fulfill their independent reporting requirements.
The system continues to draw from its independent roots by supporting data connections to a majority of exterior softwares. Following Workday’s acquisition of the product in 2018, the connectedness between Adaptive and the rest of the Workday suite continues to expand with every release.
With a proper Adaptive Planning implementation, planning leaders should be able to inspire confidence and buy-in across their organization through consistency, automation and flexibility. Achieving these results is made possible by designing data structures and processes mirroring ERP activity while also scaling to achieve reporting needs.
How Does Workday Adaptive Planning Work?
Adaptive works by sourcing both data and meta-data values from exterior systems (Ex: Workday Financials, NetSuite, Salesforce, etc.) AND/OR leveraging user-inputs to support forecast modeling and reporting. The data-flow diagram below exemplifies how, by moving left to right, forecasting cycles are able to produce the required reporting in a timely manner.
Ok that’s great - but what now?
Now that you have an understanding of what Adaptive is capable of, how do you get started? Stormloop frequently is presented with situations where a client knows they want to use a tool, but isn’t quite sure what they need to prepare to produce a successful implementation.
I like to start by moving backwards from reporting needs to how we are going to produce these reports in Adaptive:
What reporting capabilities would you like your Adaptive user to be able to call upon? Specifically, which accounts (Ex: General Ledger Reporting, ARR, Gross Margin, etc.) need to be able to be sliced by which elements (Ex: cost centers, vendors, subsidiaries, etc.)
Working backwards, which methods of planning would you like to use for each reporting metric? Usually I’ll split these into 3 categories: Modeling, 0-Based Input, Roll-Forward (leveraging historical actuals to produce similar values in forecasting time periods)
How will we support these methods of planning with data we already have? Where and how would we like general ledger actuals to be received by Adaptive? Would we like to invest in integrations to push data into Adaptive (and for which purposes)?
Finally, let's connect the dots by thinking about the security we need to establish within the Adaptive instance to firewall specific pieces of data AND optimize our user-interface to leverage the strengths of Adaptive.
By having these topics discussed prior to an implementation, you can make sure that you have a clear vision of the future of your Adaptive instance. Workday’s Adaptive documentation provides excellent support to understand and troubleshoot most functionalities within the tool.
However, if you require best-practice recommendations and support, Stormloop Services can help you build and optimize your Adaptive instance!
Interested in more content or want to hear more? Email us at info@stormlooptech.com or follow us on LinkedIn for more information and helpful tips on all Workday product areas.
Written by: Nate Devine https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-devine-5080a3ba/
Stormloop Technologies https://www.linkedin.com/company/stormloop-technologies-llc/mycompany/
