Strategic Workforce Planning With Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview decision-makers at five organizations, conducting a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with deploying Workday Adaptive Planning.¹  This abstract, while summarizing results from the full TEI study of Workday Adaptive Planning study, focuses specifically on the workforce planning product offering for the interviewees’ organizations.

One interviewee derived value from the workforce planning feature of Workday Adaptive Planning and was able to meaningfully quantify its benefits. Three other interviewees were able to discuss the specific benefits and capabilities gained through their use of Workday Adaptive Planning for workforce planning and will also be referenced in this spotlight. These interviewees include:

• The HRIS solutions architect for a health technology provider with $19 billion in revenue and 70,000 employees. This interviewee’s organization used Workday Adaptive Planning for financial planning broadly, but the interviewee focused more on workforce and cost planning.
• The director of corporate planning for an engineering services firm generating $2 billion in sales with 10,000 employees.
• The senior director of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) for a transportation technology enterprise with about $800 million in revenue and around 900 employees.
• The senior director of finance for an automation software firm generating $150 million in sales and employing 500 people.

Before implementing Workday Adaptive Planning, the interviewees said their organizations faced significant challenges in workforce planning. They each struggled with a lack of standardized processes, data inconsistency, and inefficient, time-consuming manual efforts. Planning was often done in disparate spreadsheets, leading to errors, data manipulation issues, and a lack of real-time data access. This made it difficult to trust and rely on their data, perform accurate scenario planning, and make timely adjustments. The interviewees’ organizations also faced challenges in consolidating plans from multiple units, which required significant manual effort and resources.

Workday Adaptive Planning is an enterprise planning software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for financial, workforce, sales, and operational planning. It allows integration with a wide variety of data sources and supports a more holistic view of the business. After adopting Workday Adaptive Planning, the interviewees noted their organizations experienced improvements. They standardized and integrated planning processes, providing a single source of truth and access to real-time data. They were able to increase data accuracy and trust, enabling better decision-making and strategic workforce planning. The various planning processes became more efficient and streamlined, reducing the time and resources required. Additionally, the enhanced flexibility and scenario planning capabilities allowed the interviewees’ organizations to respond more effectively to changing business conditions, ultimately improving their overall operational efficiency and effectiveness.

INVESTMENT DRIVERS FOR Workforce Planning

In their prior state, the interviewees’ organizations relied on manual, spreadsheet-based, and time-consuming processes for workforce and headcount planning. This resulted in the interviewees’ organizations struggling with several challenges, including:

• Lack of standardized planning workflows. Interviewees shared that workforce and cost planning was done locally with different processes and nonstandard definitions, leading to administrative and data quality issues. Planning was usually done in spreadsheets, which was error-prone due to manual data entry and lacked the dimensional depth necessary to maintain detailed and accurate workforce plans. Additionally, consolidating plans from different regions was time-consuming and required significant manual effort, further exacerbating the potential for errors.
• Static and inconsistent data. Data existed in spreadsheets and the ability to run different scenarios and adjust assumptions during planning and forecasting processes was limited, which hindered the interviewees’ organizations’ abilities to adapt to change. The director of corporate planning in engineering services at an engineering services firm explained: “The data is consolidated, and it’s dropped into a location [for both our plans and forecasts]. So it’s static data that you can’t do anything with. No scenario planning, no sensitivities, all of that in our previous world was impossible.”
• Inefficient and time-consuming processes. Planning and forecasting efforts took significant time to complete and, despite teams’ diligence, errors still slipped through. In the context of overall planning and forecasting — but also applicable for workforce management — the senior director of finance at an automation software organization shared: “We were doing a lot of data manipulation as far as trying to pull down and record actuals. In [spreadsheets], it can be pretty hard to version control and actually trust that everything is coming out correctly. We were looking to spend less time doing data manipulation … [and] we saw our [spreadsheet] processes could be fairly error prone.”

Workday Adaptive Planning Features

The interviewees’ organizations chose Workday Adaptive Planning because of improved efficiency, accuracy, and flexibility of workforce planning, enabling better decision-making and strategic planning. Some features of Workday Adaptive Planning include:

• Standardized and integrated planning workflows. By implementing a standardized process for workforce and cost planning, the interviewees’ organizations were able to plan consistently and accurately across the organization. Interviewees noted that the integrated planning processes within Workday Adaptive Planning reduced errors and improved accuracy. The HRIS solutions architect for a health technology provider shared, “Not only were managers able to self-service in the tool without the involvement of HR and finance, but they could also see how they compare to the rest of the organization.”

• Access to reliable and real-time data. The interviewees noted that the Workday Adaptive Planning platform provided a single source of truth for workforce data, enabling their organizations to make real-time adjustment and facilitating better decision-making. By reducing manual data manipulation, decision-makers had higher trust and confidence in the data. The senior director of FP&A for a transportation technology enterprise explained: “We plan to the day of when people or roles are expected to be filled. At some point of organizational growth, you’re hiring so many people, and the volume is so large, and you really cannot handle it with spreadsheets.” Emphasizing the point of a single source of truth, the director of corporate planning for an engineering services firm said: “We have over 200 users in the system right now. It’s the same exact data that they’re all seeing.”

• Efficient and streamlined planning processes. With Adaptive Planning features, interviewees were able to streamline the planning process, reducing the number of iterations and touchpoints to save time and resources. The senior director of finance for an automation software firm stated: “We continue to be able to run the company from a very detailed planning standpoint. Each functional organization is budgeting for and reviewing their costs basically down to the vendor level and at a headcount level.”

• Improved flexibility and scenario planning. Interviewees emphasized that Workday Adaptive Planning not only enabled them to do robust scenario planning, but that efficiencies of the platform also increased flexibility and allowed for real-time adjustments to plans. This enabled their organizations to respond to changing business conditions. The HRIS solutions architect for a health technology provider explained how managers had flexibility in hiring: “With the adaptive planning process, once you have a plan that has been approved, then for the following three to 12 months, you have the ability to manage your positions in your organization without requiring any extra approvals because those were approved originally.”

Key Results

Based on the interviews, Forrester constructed a TEI framework, a composite company, and an ROI analysis that illustrates the areas financially affected. The composite organization is a representative of the interviewees’ organizations, and it is used to present the aggregate financial analysis below. The results of the investment for the composite organization include:

Increased business manager productivity related to planning activities by up to 12%. With streamlined processes for planning activities, improved data accessibility, and increased visibility for P&L, senior business managers for the composite organization saw their productivity improve from 10% in Year 1 to 11% in Year 2 and 12% in Year 3.

• Productivity improvement for line of business managers. While workforce planning is the focus of this spotlight, it is important to note that the impact of workforce planning capabilities is amplified when embedded within a connected, unified platform. By bridging finance and HR, interviewees noted Workday Adaptive Planning enabled workforce planners to make faster decisions that were more aligned to reflect both financial constraints and talent realities. The director of corporate planning said that some parts of their engineering services organization had thousands of small projects; individually planning those wasn’t practical. With Workday Adaptive Planning, they were able to pool smaller, related projects together to streamline planning processes. This interviewee said: “[We don’t have to] spend the time planning the individual projects, [we] spend time planning the group of projects. So that was a huge time savings we took off the teams.”
• Streamlined annual business planning. Interviewees also shared that Workday Adaptive Planning improved business leaders’ annual headcount planning processes by allowing them to streamline the process, improve data visibility and consistency, and reduce back-and-forth conversations. The senior director of finance for an automation software firm said: “The overall planning process is much more efficient. I think if we were doing it in [spreadsheets], it would definitely take us more time to put together these forecasts. We have likely saved at least two to three days of back-and-forth iteration amongst ourselves.”

Improved FP&A productivity by up to 20%. With reduced manual work, increased automation, better availability and visibility, and reduced risk of errors, FP&A personnel for the composite organization saw their productivity improve from 10% in Year 1 to 20% by Year 3. Many of the functions performed by FP&A personnel are also part of workforce planning that is done by HR personnel and business unit managers. It would be reasonable to assume that the latter would also experience a productivity benefit in the 10% to 20% range at the composite organization.

• Forecasting and planning. Interviewees explained that leveraging Workday Adaptive Planning for a single source of truth — with data they could trust without needing to manually aggregate and consolidate it — significantly improved their planning and forecasting processes. The senior director of finance in automation software explained that Workday Adaptive Planning took their forecasting processes from days to hours and the need to validate data decreased.
• Headcount planning. Similarly, better data quality and visibility, as well as the improved agility provided by Workday Adaptive Planning, reduced the time FP&A personnel needed to spend working with business leaders on headcount planning. The HRIS solutions architect in health technology shared, “[Workday Adaptive Planning] is enabling [workflow automation], and it’s practically transforming the data quality risks, the conflicts that appear in those data quality checks, and any of the other data-driven components.” Their organization was able to reduce the FP&A efforts around headcount planning by approximately 10% with Workday Adaptive Planning. 
• Reporting. Interviewees shared that Workday Adaptive Planning automated standard reporting and helped create presentations. This removed the administrative burden from the FP&A team both for the creation of reporting and time spent checking for errors. Additionally, it enabled ad hoc reporting that would have been challenging in the previous environment. The director of corporate planning in engineering services said: “OfficeConnect [a plug-in for spreadsheet, word processing, and presentation software] is really a game changer. … The fact that you can perform ad hoc analysis … you can do it extremely quickly. You’re not relying on static reports. … If you need to get something on the fly, you can build it very, very quickly and source that data in minutes versus hours.”

Cost optimization worth $2.0 million over three years. With Workday Adaptive Planning, the composite organization can optimize support costs that impact selling, general and administrative expenses (SG&A), cost of goods and revenue, and research and development costs.

• Interviewees shared that being able to plan, forecast, and report on costs at a detailed level (including the vendor and employee levels) offered benefits to their organizations. In addition to the time savings Workday Adaptive Planning provided in this area, it allowed the interviewees’ FP&A teams to work with their business partners to optimize spending across their organizations. Interviewees highlighted several examples where Workday Adaptive Planning supported their ability to optimize costs.
• The senior director of finance in software explained, “[With Workday Adaptive Planning], each function is budgeting for and reviewing their costs down to the vendor, [product line], and headcount levels.” They continued, saying: “[As a result,] we’ve been able to maintain really good cost guardrails so that the teams are operating where they said they’re going to [operate]. Then we’re able to identify any areas of risk or areas [in which] they want to invest more than anticipated. We’re able to have really structured conversations around that.”
• The senior director of FP&A at a transportation technology organization explained that Workday Adaptive Planning allowed their FP&A team to be proactive in managing costs with their business partners rather than reactive. They said, “Instead of saying, ‘Hey, we need you to slow hiring, or we can’t spend this money,’ it [would be], ‘Oh, we shouldn’t have hired, or we shouldn’t have spent that money.’”

Appendix A: Endnotes