Many companies think that because they have enough people filling positions, those people will always be at their beck and call, whenever and wherever they’re needed. Wrong. The companies that seem to always put workforce (aka “people”) planning on the back burner are the same ones who end up understaffed and lacking organizational alignment in the long run.
From experiencing your own people system issues or watching other companies fall short on the “people” front, you’ve seen that planning is paramount for companies that want to stay competitive in an ever-changing world. Far too often, these organizations rely on a slow, manual planning process that doesn’t allow them to react quickly to business changes. Making things even less effective, these tools are typically siloed and disconnected, preventing companies from maintaining a clear view of their business.
If you’re thinking that there is no better way to optimize your people systems, we’re here to tell you that there is a better way—Workday Adaptive Planning. Workday Adaptive Planning is a planning platform designed to give you a comprehensive view of your company’s success. In this article, we’ll cover the benefits of the Workday planning solutions as well as how they can boost three key areas of your business.
Let’s get started.
What is Workday Adaptive Planning?
Workday Adaptive Planning, formerly known as Workday Adaptive Insights, is a cloud-based technology platform that helps your business collect, integrate, and organize your data systems into one place so you can break free from those old-school spreadsheets and outdated systems. The solution includes embedded analytics, testing capabilities, and important reporting functions that allow companies to align personal and organizational goals and optimize business performance, regardless of the size or complexity of their organization.
It’s powered by something called Elastic Hypercube Technology (EHT). While that sounds a bit like something you’d find inside a science fiction novel, EHT is simply Workday’s in-memory modeling engine that delivers the performance you need, when you need it. Adaptive Planning also includes a built-in integration framework to make sure you can connect to data from any ERP, HCM, CRM, or other systems, without the hassle of dealing with third-party tools.
3 Business Areas That Shine with Workday Adaptive Planning
For a planning solution to truly be effective, it needs to enable and empower all users—even those outside the Finance Department—and Workday Adaptive Planning does just that. This means that all departments and functions can create and manage their own models and link them back to the corporate plan. (Pretty impressive, right?)
Let’s take a closer look into the three main parts of the platform:
Workforce Planning
Workday Adaptive Planning for Workforce Planning allows you to plan for any scenario, model your workforce, standardize plans, and collaborate across your organization. It also gives you the ability to deliver dynamic headcount and skills-based plans, as well as strengthen the collaboration between human resources (HR) and business leaders to optimize your workforce plans.
In addition to its ability to build plans that optimize business systems, Workday’s adaptive workforce planning solution also allows you to take a dip into the operational planning side of your organization and ask questions based on “what-if” scenarios. For example, the scenario planning feature lets users ask important questions, like, “What if we need to change the start date for our new employees?”, test this scenario, and identify specific plans of action for the future. Each department in your organization, including HR, sales, and finance, has this ability to test scenarios and build plans that will maximize business success in the future.
Financial Planning
As you might expect, Workday Adaptive Planning for Finance is packed with everything you need in a finance software solution, including continuous financial planning, reporting, and analysis. Keeping track of your finances, especially when dealing with change or uncertainty in the industry, is a vital part of your organizational success, so having a comprehensive planning system like Workday is essential to your success.
With Workday Adaptive, you can also produce accurate budgeting and forecasting information, gain valuable financial insights, evaluate multiple scenarios across large data sets, and deliver reports in minutes. What else could you ask for?
Sales Planning
Workday Adaptive Planning for Sales helps optimize your sales resources by enhancing sales performance and predictability. The tool makes it easier to create rep capacity plans to meet bookings targets, deploy quotas, set up balanced territories, and collaborate on possible sales scenarios.
With integration into corporate finance, sales teams can gain access to proprietary and confidential Workday insights that show how their actions impact other parts of the business and overall organizational success. And the reverse is also true—connecting more directly to Sales (and other departments) helps Finance access the information they need to help plan across the company.
Benefits of Workday Adaptive Planning
When you boost the planning power of non-Finance departments, the company wins as a whole—better planning abilities makes it easier for your organization to develop a comprehensive view and to build a stronger foundation for the future. And all this is possible with Workday Adaptive Planning.
Some key benefits of Workday Adaptive Planning include:
- Saving time by automating planning and execution functions
- Adapting to ever-changing business conditions with a modeling engine designed for enterprise planning
- Making better decisions with a tool that can be used throughout the business
- Reducing friction between systems within your organization
- Enabling and empowering users with easy-to-use technology
- And much more
How to Succeed with Workday Adaptive Planning
Getting the most out of Workday Adaptive Planning software requires a partner with the expertise to help you achieve your goals. At Surety Systems, our senior-level Workday consulting team can help you on this journey by providing expert advice on everything from implementation to training and on-going support.
We’ve also included a same profile of one of our best Adaptive Workday consultants to give you a better idea of what to expect when partnering with us.
Surety Senior Workday Adaptive Planning Consultant
- 8+ years in ERP consulting space
- Techno-functional experience with Workday HCM, Financials, and Workday Adaptive Planning
- Certified in all current Workday Adaptive Planning Certifications- Product, Sales, Customer Success & Support
- Focuses on full life cycle Adaptive Planning implementations – from configuration and design to end-user training
- Experience in a wide range of industries including healthcare, oil & gas, and higher education
If you’re ready to learn more about Workday Adaptive Planning implementation steps or how Workday Adaptive Planning works for your organization, contact us today to get started.
