Even before the world-changing events of 2020, businesses, government entities, and other types of organizations had a pressing need for tools to help them plan and forecast different scenarios. Increased competition, a changing global environment, and the introduction of various cutting-edge technologies (such as AI) have prompted organizations to find new ways to navigate these challenges with confidence. The onset of the global pandemic early in 2020 accelerated these trends dramatically, creating a rapidly changing environment and forcing organizations to quickly adjust their existing strategies and plan for different eventualities. It was a situation in which the value of a powerful planning tool, like Workday Adaptive Planning, became crystal clear.
During the first few weeks of the pandemic, Workday saw a 15x increase in forecasting and build out scenarios. One week it even saw a 30x increase. Since Workday Adaptive Planning allows you to quickly build what-if scenarios and allows for an easy way to collaborate across the planning cycle, organizations could easily model a wide variety of scenarios across each facet of their organization.
No matter what industry you are in, planning for the future is critical. That said, different industries need to account for different challenges. In this post, we will take a look at what Workday Adaptive Planning is, how it augments your organization, and why all industries can benefit from this powerful planning tool.
What is Workday Adaptive Planning?
Workday Adaptive Planning (formerly Adaptive Insights) is designed to leverage the wealth of data available in your human capital management platform, payroll system, financial management solution, etc., and us it to create accurate forecasting models and reports. Here are a few of the features that Workday Adaptive Planning provides:
- Modeling – Essential to today’s constantly changing landscape, Workday Adaptive Planning’s modeling tools streamline the modeling process, allowing your organization to run models at a moment’s notice, not just on an annual or quarterly basis.
- Analytics – Create custom dashboards and visualize important data.
- Reporting – Workday Adaptive Planning provides robust reporting tools, making it easy to create reports for your management team or board.
Workday Adaptive Planning helps organizations with workforce planning, financial planning, operational planning, and sales planning. It encompasses your entire organization, pulling data from different sources and delivering value to all your internal teams, not just finance and HR.
While Workday Adaptive Planning can be used with numerous cloud ERP systems, it works best with Workday’s suite of solutions, like Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Financial Management. Workday’s suite of solutions centralizes and standardizes data in a single solution, meaning that data is more likely to be accurate, and it doesn’t take additional time to collect and clean data from various systems.
A New Way to Plan for the Future
The real value of Workday Adaptive Planning comes down to how it can transform your organization.
For example, instead of relying on annual planning, your organization can adopt a continuous planning approach in which you plan on a quarterly, monthly, or even weekly basis, if necessary. This allows your organization to pivot quickly should unforeseen challenges arise.
Continuous planning can also extend how far out your organization plans into the future, making it possible to develop two-year, three-year, or even 4+ year plans. Developing plans this far in advance will naturally require your C-Suite to be on board, but once leadership is bought in and a multi-year plan is in action, it will give your organization a distinct competitive advantage.
Another way that Workday Adaptive Planning can change how your organization approaches planning is by making the planning process more collaborative. Since the tool makes it easy to access and share reports, or to allow managers to pull up metrics that they may not have been able to easily access previously themselves, teams from across different departments can track and analyze data and participate in the planning process.
Industries that Benefit from Workday Adaptive Planning
As mentioned earlier – all industries plan. Here are how some industries can benefit from Workday Adaptive Planning:
- Banking, Insurance, and Financial Services – Workday Adaptive Planning helps businesses in this sector adapt to regulatory changes and shifting markets.
- Professional Services - Businesses in this sector need robust workforce planning tools to ensure they have the staff needed to tackle new projects as they come in.
- Higher Education - One of the industries most impacted by the pandemic, the higher education sector is still very much in a transition phase, benefiting from Workday Adaptive Planning’s what-if scenario features.
- Nonprofits – With constantly changing funding situations, this sector benefits greatly from Workday Adaptive Planning’s financial planning tools.
Soon, we will post separate articles that go into more depth on how Adaptive Planning can benefit these specific industries, so make sure to subscribe to our blog so that you don’t miss them.
To learn more about Workday Adaptive Planning and how Collaborative Solutions can help you deploy and manage this powerful planning tool, visit our Adaptive Planning page or contact us.
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