Workday Adaptive Planning
What is Workday Adaptive Planning?
Cloud-based planning and CPM solution with integrated functions for planning, budgeting and forecasting, reporting, dashboarding and analysis
About Workday Adaptive Planning
Self-description of the vendor
Workday Adaptive Planning BARC Review & Rating
Provider and product description
Workday is a provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources used by more than 10,000 organizations of all sizes and in all industries around the world. The company has $8.4 billion in revenue and more than 20,000 employees worldwide. Workday’s portfolio includes applications for financial management, human resources, enterprise planning and analytics. The vendor’s core performance management and analytics offerings are Workday Financial Management, Workday Adaptive Planning and Workday Prism Analytics.
Workday Adaptive Planning was an acquisition to extend Workday’s enterprise planning and CPM capabilities. The flexible and scalable cloud-based platform provides business-user-friendly functionality for various CPM processes, particularly planning, budgeting and forecasting, as well as reporting, analysis and dashboarding. It enables continuous, scenario-based planning across the organization, from enterprise-wide financial planning and analysis to operational planning for specific functions such as workforce, sales, demand and supply, projects and marketing. In addition, Workday Adaptive Planning includes embedded AI/ML capabilities and benefits from Workday’s overall Illuminate AI strategy. Workday Adaptive Planning provides predictive forecasting and anomaly detection, and a Workday Assistant for conversational planning and intelligent variance analysis is in the pipeline. Leveraging generative AI and natural language processing for planning to assist and guide users is a key area of investment for Workday and improves the user experience by making it easier for business users to explore data, test scenarios and gain insights through natural language queries.
Workday Adaptive Planning is used through a fully web-based application that is compatible with popular browsers. Microsoft Office add-ins are available. The platform is built on a multidimensional, in-memory modeling engine (Elastic Hypercube Technology), with data stored relationally in the back end. All calculations and aggregations are performed in-memory. Workday Adaptive Planning enables interoperability and data integration with a wide range of software applications as well as back-end and third-party systems (ERP, CRM, HCM, etc.). Customers have the flexibility to use either the APIs or a purpose-built embedded integration framework (including multiple prebuilt connectors) to manage data integrations.
Workday Adaptive Planning can be used together with the Workday suite of applications or with non-Workday solutions. The vendor’s marketing and sales strategy positions it as a standalone product and offers it as a part of the suite to Workday HCM and Workday Financial Management customers. The vendor will continue to position the product within its existing customer base as a future strategic direction. Customers deploying Workday Adaptive Planning with Workday HCM and/or Workday Financial Management benefit from 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. In total, Workday Adaptive Planning is used by approximately 7,000 customers of all sizes across a wide range of industries around the world.
Workday Financial Management provides a full ERP with comprehensive financial and accounting capabilities. For financial consolidation and close, its functionality enables companies to consolidate at the point of transaction. Workday Consolidations consolidates the financial results of subsidiaries into the parent company to create combined financial results. It automatically creates intercompany and eliminating entries across the group. In 2024, a new packaged offering was released that combines all the planning capabilities of Workday Adaptive Planning with the financial consolidation and close capabilities of Workday Financial Management for customers who want to follow an integrated approach.
Complementing the portfolio, Workday Prism Analytics (acquired with Platfora) provides data management and analytics capabilities, including the ability to integrate and ingest operational data and combine it with financial information to drive broader insights and decision-making. Workday Prism Analytics supports an analytics layer that makes Prism data sets discoverable and searchable, combined with core Workday data, and presented in a variety of dashboards and reports.
Strengths and challenges of Workday Adaptive Planning
BARC’s viewpoint on the product’s strengths and challenges.
Strengths
- Workday offers a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise applications for financial management, human resources, enterprise planning and analytics. All products are built on a consistent cloud architecture with an intelligent data core that combines financial and operational data.
- Workday Adaptive Planning is a flexible and scalable cloud-based platform that provides business users with integrated planning, budgeting and forecasting, reporting, analysis and dashboarding capabilities. It can be used together with the Workday suite of applications or standalone with non-Workday solutions.
- Workday Adaptive Planning provides flexibility for a variety of planning approaches (centralized top-down, decentralized bottom-up) and planning topics (including operational planning and financial planning) for organizations of all sizes and industries. It includes built-in financial intelligence with a native understanding of account types such as assets, liabilities, revenues and expenses.
- According to feedback in The Planning Survey, customers are satisfied with Workday’s innovativeness. Many customers are using the product for use cases such as cloud-based planning, driver-based planning and also predictive planning. The product’s win rate in head-to-head evaluations is also excellent.
Challenges
- Workday Adaptive Planning is purely cloud-based and not available on premises. Web access is required to use the product (except for offline planning using Excel templates).
- Unlike previous years, customer feedback in The Planning Survey 25 revealed some dissatisfaction with Workday’s support and the product’s price to value. There are several critical user reviews that express the view that support and implementation assistance from the vendor and its partners is not always satisfactory and has worsened since the Workday acquisition. Perhaps Workday’s growth and continued acquisition of new partners means that the quality of support and partner implementation experience is not at a consistent level. Workday is aware of this and has taken steps to improve and expand its partner ecosystem, launching a new Workday Partner Center to better support its partner and customer community.
- Customer feedback also shows that not all customers are satisfied with the predefined data connectivity and data integration capabilities of Workday Adaptive Planning. Workday provides its own data integration framework and open APIs. In addition, third-party ETL tools can be used, and customers leverage prebuilt adapters to load data from more than 350 unique systems. All integrations (including data mapping and transformation) can be automated to run on a set schedule or manually on demand.
- The majority of Workday Adaptive Planning’s business remains in North America. However, the number of international customers and revenues has increased since the acquisition and Workday is deepening global implementation services and consulting relationships, introducing regional product enhancements, and focusing on increasing brand awareness outside North America. Prospects outside North America should evaluate the vendor’s and partners’ local consulting and support capabilities.
Workday Adaptive Planning User Reviews & Experiences
The information contained in this section is based on user feedback and actual experience with Workday Adaptive Planning.
The information and figures are largely drawn from BARC’s The BI & Analytics Survey, The Planning Survey, The Financial Consolidation Survey and The Data Management Survey. You can find out more about these surveys by clicking on the relevant links.
Why users buy Workday Adaptive Planning and what problems they have using it
- Get independent information on software solutions, market developments and trends in data, analytics, business intelligence, data science and corporate performance management.
- Make data & analytics decisions based on numbers, data, facts and expert knowledge
- Access to all premium articles and all our research, including all software comparison studies, scores and surveys.
- Unlimited access to the BARC media library
- Consume unlimited content anywhere
Full user reviews and KPI results for Workday Adaptive Planning
All key figures for Workday Adaptive Planning at a glance.
- Get independent information on software solutions, market developments and trends in data, analytics, business intelligence, data science and corporate performance management.
- Make data & analytics decisions based on numbers, data, facts and expert knowledge
- Access to all premium articles and all our research, including all software comparison studies, scores and surveys.
- Unlimited access to the BARC media library
- Consume unlimited content anywhere
Individual user reviews for Workday Adaptive Planning
Number of employees
Industry
Source
What do you like best?
Its flexibility and drag-drop no-code functionality.
What do you like least/what could be improved?
It needs better integration back into Workday itself - also, more clarity around its use with office connect.
What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?
It is a separate product and project, so don't try to implement it at the same time as Workday itself.
How would you sum up your experience?
Good system with positive feedback from users.
Number of employees
Industry
Source
What do you like best?
User-friendly, easy to test different scenarios with.
What do you like least/what could be improved?
Since Adaptive was acquired by Workday, the customer service is not as good. Also, the cost has increased substantially.
What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?
Easy to use and learn.
How would you sum up your experience?
Great.
Number of employees
Industry
Source
What do you like best?
Very scaleable, easy to use, it can report directly out of Excel.
What do you like least/what could be improved?
Make more use of Machine Learning/ AI to assist with budget preparation/ variance analysis.
What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?
Go for it - you won't regret it! Just remember to document how your budget model works!
How would you sum up your experience?
Very favourable.
Number of employees
Industry
Source
What do you like best?
It is easily accessable, users like it.
What do you like least/what could be improved?
Far too expensive.
What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?
Make sure you look in the market as there are lots of products out there.
How would you sum up your experience?
Think it is a very powerful tool with lots of functionality, but unless you use the full range of functions, it is very expensive. Think about how Adaptive is going to work with your ERP/FMS.
Number of employees
Industry
Source
What do you like best?
The high flexibility to adjust/ implement new functionalities and logics on your own. As a product (Adaptive) and process owner (Personnel planning and budgeting) of Adaptive, I am able to evolve the tool and integrate everything on my own without the need for external developers.
What do you like least/what could be improved?
The performance on working sheets with a high amount of logics in place can take a hit. Reporting is limited in some aspects.
What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?
Specifying the use/ business case/ process in the highest detail and as aligned as possible before working on the company-specific setup with the implementing consultant to avoid constant requirement changes during the setup phase. (This should be a given naturally!). By having an Adaptive expert in the company who can bring the tool and accompanying processes forward, it is possible to react quickly to new demands of stakeholders and be independant of external consulting knowledge and support.
How would you sum up your experience?
It's a very user-friendly tool and easy to use, for the single end user as well as for the admin to maintain, while providing flexibility and up-to-date functionalities for all planning purposes.
Number of employees
Industry
Source
What do you like best?
The robustness of the application and our satisfaction with the product overall is increasing as we get to understand it more.
What do you like least/what could be improved?
The current setup does not lend itself to scenario/ what-if analysis easily.
What key advice would you give to other companies looking to introduce/use the product?
Give adequate time before implementation to establish what you want from the system.
How would you sum up your experience?
Good … and getting better.
