Workday is a cloud-based enterprise software and ERP vendor with a particular focus on human capital management, financial management and enterprise planning. The company has a turnover of $4.32 billion and employs 14,200 people worldwide. In 2018, Workday acquired Adaptive Insights, a planning and CPM software vendor headquartered in Palo Alto, California, to extend its performance management offerings. Workday Adaptive Planning is used by more than 5,800 customers of various sizes from a wide range of industries in over 50 countries.
Workday Adaptive Planning is a business-user-oriented CPM platform with functionality for various performance management processes. As a flexible and scalable solution, it supports planning, budgeting and forecasting processes including modeling, scenario planning, monitoring, reporting and analysis. Financial consolidation and close are also supported. The creation of models is business-user-friendly and mainly done by drag-and-drop or point-and-click so does not require technical coding. This flexible and scalable planning platform enables continuous, active planning across the organization – from enterprise-wide financial planning and analysis to detailed planning for specific functions such as HR, sales, marketing and operations. Workday Adaptive Planning offers built-in financial intelligence with a native understanding of account types such as assets, liabilities, revenues and expenses.
Workday Adaptive Planning can be used together with the Workday suite of applications or with non-Workday solutions. Customers who deploy Workday Adaptive Planning with Workday HCM and/or Workday Financial Management leverage a unified security and user experience, as well as native data management with the ability to drill back to data and master data in the ERP system or publish plans back to Workday core transactional systems.
It is a purely cloud-based CPM platform that can leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure as its hosting provider. The product is used via a fully web-based application (HTML5), which is compatible with popular browsers and can also be run on browsers on mobile devices. Supplementary Microsoft Office add-ins are available. Workday Adaptive Planning is based on a multidimensional in-memory modeling engine (Elastic Hypercube Technology), whereby data is stored in a relational database in the back end. All calculations and aggregations are performed in-memory.
User & Use Cases
82 percent of Workday Adaptive Planning users are planning users – significantly above the survey average of 64 percent – reflecting the fact that it is essentially an integrated planning and CPM tool rather than a BI and analytics tool. This is also reflected in the area of planning use cases. Customers leverage Workday Adaptive Planning for financial planning (89 percent) and operational planning (70 percent). Here, planning takes place at different aggregation levels. Workday Adaptive Planning is particularly used for budgeting (98 percent) and forecasting (70 percent). Besides planning, customers mainly use it for ad hoc query (89 percent) and standard/enterprise reporting (82 percent). Many respondents plan to use it for dashboards/scorecards (45 percent), strategic planning (40 percent) and data analysis (36 percent) in the future.
Workday Adaptive Planning targets companies of all sizes across all industries. 70 percent of our sample of Workday Adaptive Planning customers come from mid-sized companies (100-2,500 employees) with a median of 38 users (including 23 using planning functionality), but the mean of 90 users (76 for planning) indicates there are also several larger implementations.
Current vs. planned use (planning use cases)
N=46
Current vs. planned use (besides planning)
N=46
Percentage of employees using Workday Adaptive Planning
N=46
Planning users (as a percentage of all users)
N=46
Total number of users per company
N=46
Planning users per company
N=46
Company size (number of employees)
N=46
Summary of Workday Adaptive Planning highlights
With three top ranks and 15 leading positions across five different peer groups, Workday Adaptive Planning again achieves a great set of results in this year’s Planning Survey. Convincing ratings in several important KPIs help to consolidate its position as a market-leading planning and CPM platform. Companies can benefit from using Workday Adaptive Planning in terms of increased planning frequency, increased transparency of planning, improved integration of planning with reporting/analysis and more precise/detailed planning, leading to a better quality of planning results for many customers. 83 percent of Workday Adaptive Planning users say they would “definitely” or “probably” recommend the product to other organizations – a strong result, which is a great indicator of customer satisfaction.
Cloud Planning – Top-ranked
Peer group: Business Software Generalists
Cloud Planning
Peer group: Midsize/Departmental Implementations
Cloud Planning – Top-ranked
Peer group: Fin. Plan. & Consolidation-Focused Products
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