Improved FP&A Productivity

Evidence and data. According to Forrester research, successful FP&A implementations enable strategic automation by targeting repetitive, low-value activities like data collection, consolidation, and basic variance calculation, while preserving human judgment for strategic analysis and decision support.⁵

Interviewees explained their organizations’ FP&A teams were responsible for monthly, quarterly, and annual budgeting, forecasting, and reporting activities. Prior to using Workday Adaptive Planning, their FP&A teams relied on data across disparate spreadsheets and dedicated a substantial portion of their time to transactional, routine tasks for short-term planning. With access to centralized data, dashboards, scenario modeling, and embedded AI tools such as predictive forecaster and anomaly detection, FP&A teams gained efficiencies in their daily workflows and could dedicate more time to strategic activities by becoming an advisor to their organizations and thus focus on long-term planning.

• The head of commercial finance at the legal services organization shared that prior to using Workday Adaptive Planning, their FP&A team only spent six weeks on strategic planning. With Adaptive, this increased to 26 weeks.

  • When asked about their experience with predictive forecaster, the interviewee said: “Predictive forecaster takes our actual data and current forecast and continues to predict that based on various factors. It gives a very easy first basis of a five-year projected forecast based on run rate and then I can play around with assumptions and tweak it. Having something already built was easier than building from scratch.”
  • With regard to anomaly detection, the interviewee said: “We found an interesting use case for anomaly detector. We started using it as a way of building out seasonal expense curve. It’s really improved our predictability of expenses and reduced the amount of variances we have to explain. It gives a more robust forecast.”

• The senior director, head of finance transformation at the real estate financial services organization noted: “The team was at a burnout stage two years ago. Now, we have systems that track employee time and we’ve seen a significant decrease, around 20% to 30%, in employee time in terms of utilization. They’re definitely able to log off at a reasonable hour compared to in the past, when they spent a lot of their weekends working.”

• The group head of planning cloud ERP at the media organization shared two examples of tasks:

  • On reporting, they said: “The consolidated view of data has definitely helped with reporting. When the actual close takes place, we can report numbers using AI features and predict the forecast within two hours. The moment we close — within two hours — we can send a report to the CFO with updated numbers direct from Workday Adaptive Planning. That is a huge improvement compared to the past, when it took two days.”
  • On cash flow planning, the same interviewee noted: “Cash flow planning used to take three days manually using spreadsheets. Last year, we built a new cash flow model in Workday Adaptive Planning and there’s an automated flow loading the data from respective management books. Within one working day, we have a full free cash flow. That’s a big game changer that took place last year.”

• The group head of planning cloud ERP at the media organization also noted: “I can tell you that now our forecast accuracy starts from 95% to 99.8%, depending on the month. Last year, I ran the numbers and it met an accuracy of 98.2%. Imagine, for example, a typical bottom-up forecast, which is being created by the people is giving us a deviation of at least 8% actual versus the plan. … it’s a huge problem.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization, Forrester assumes:

• There are 20 FP&A team members in Year 1, 21 in Year 2, and 22 in Year 3.

• With Workday Adaptive Planning, FP&A team members gain 25% efficiency in Year 1, 30% in Year 2, and 35% in Year 3.

• The average fully burdened salary for a finance team member is $131,300.

• Seventy-five percent of recaptured time is spent on productive activities.

Risks. This benefit may vary among organizations depending on:

• The number of FP&A team members involved in planning and forecasting activities and their average salaries.

• How much time and effort these members spend on data collection, manipulation, and checking, reporting, or other manual tasks that Workday Adaptive Planning is able to automate.

• How Workday Adaptive Planning is deployed in the organization — the data incorporated, the functionality used, and the level and speed of adoption by FP&A employees.

• The extent to which recaptured time is repurposed productively.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.4 million.

Improved HR Productivity

Evidence and data. Interviewees explained that their organizations’ HR team was the other core user of Workday Adaptive Planning for both repetitive (e.g., headcount or workforce planning) and ad hoc activities (e.g., M&A due diligence). For workforce planning, the focus was on both supply and demand planning to understand the workforce and their resource allocations. The HR team faced many of the same challenges as the FP&A team working out of spreadsheets: disparate data, long workflow timelines, and the inability to answer data related questions from leadership accurately. The FP&A team managed to gain efficiency upon integrating with Workday HCM, setting up automated reporting, and relying on real-time dashboards.

• The senior manager, workforce planning and intelligence at the manufacturing organization explained that their team shifted from spending 80% of their time on administering data accuracy to planning activities instead. They said: “On the workforce supply side, we’ve saved a lot of time. We got rid of so many spreadsheets and administrative churn. This streamlines planning as you don’t spend a whole month [aggregating data]. Now, most of the month is spent on planning and the team can rally around one point in time. Previously, different team members showed different data points in a leadership team, depending on when the data was pulled.”

• The HR director at the financial services organization shared similar sentiments.

  • On M&A due diligence, they said: “The amount of time we spend reconciling the data [for M&A due diligence] is drastically reduced. The timeline is shorter, the data is more accurate, and it is more auditable for the regulators. For example, our first acquisition [prior to using Adaptive] was 4,000 people and it took six months. The second one [after implementing Adaptive] was a 6,000-person acquisition and it took roughly five months. [Meanwhile,] we took two and a half months to complete the 1,000 person acquisition.”
  • On headcount planning, they noted: “When it was completed on a spreadsheet, it was a bunch of part-time employees. Now, it is more of a known cost because there are two dedicated employees. Even though two employees might sound like a lot, in reality it’s probably less than what we did before.”
  • On position creation, they highlighted: “We have a very rigorous process to create a new position in Workday. But now, it comes through Adaptive and it is very streamlined. The thought is, if it’s gone through the financial forecast and we’ve budgeted it, why are we re-approving in Workday?”
  • On offer letter creation, they shared: “We’re almost zany about using Adaptive as a system of record. When we look at our offer letters or at our planned separation agreements, we take the data from Adaptive as the system of record to load into Workday for a system conversion. We can identify what was on Adaptive, what was in the staging tables that went into Workday, and what went into Workday and match them back to Adaptive. We can tie all that together.” 

Modeling and assumptions. For the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization, Forrester assumes:

• There are five HR team members in Year 1, six in Year 2, and seven in Year 3.

• With Workday Adaptive Planning, FP&A team members gain 20% efficiency in Year 1, 25% in Year 2, and 30% in Year 3.

• The average fully burdened salary for an HR team member is $135,000.

• Seventy-five percent of recaptured time is spent on productive activities.

Risks. This benefit may vary among organizations depending on:

• The number of HR team members involved in planning and forecasting activities, as well as their average salaries.

• How much time and effort they spend on data collection, manipulation, and checking, reporting, or other manual tasks that Workday Adaptive Planning is able to automate.

• How Workday Adaptive Planning is deployed in the organization — the data incorporated, the functionality used, and the level and speed of adoption by HR employees.

• The extent to which recaptured time is repurposed productively.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $340,000.

Enhanced Business User Efficiency

Evidence and data. In addition to FP&A and HR users, interviewees explained how their organizations’ business users interacted with Workday Adaptive Planning in a view-only capacity. Using the dashboard visualization capabilities, business users gained quicker insight into the data needed for their day-to-day tasks that otherwise would have required sorting through various spreadsheets in their prior environment. Interviewees added that business user adoption increased steadily across their organizations as they realized these benefits.

• The head of commercial finance at the legal services organization said: “For lawyers who inherently hate numbers, every time you add a friction of the process in their place, they go: “Never mind. I can’t be bothered to dig into it. It’s just too much effort.” [Thus, we use the] Workday dashboard to present them with the information. The visualizations in the dashboard provide a health check. They can click through and interrogate the data and understand the performance of their team. This way, they don’t have to leave and go pull something else. We used to send around a report every month capturing fee earners against their targets and expect lawyers to have conversations with the fee earners. We were never sure if they ever did it. Whereas now, they can go in everyday by themselves — they’re having proactive conversations to look for problems or for people who aren’t quite where they should be.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization, Forrester assumes:

• There are 200 business users in Year 1, 210 in Year 2, and 221 in Year 3.

• In the prior environment, each business user spent 120 hours annually to consult finance and HR data.

• With Workday Adaptive Planning, business users gain 50% efficiency on these tasks.

• The average fully burdened hourly salary of a business manager is $78.

• The extent to which recaptured time is repurposed productively.

Risks. This benefit may vary among organizations depending on:

• The number and types of business users involved in consulting HR and finance databases to support their daily activities.

• How well and how quickly the business adopts Workday Adaptive Planning.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.2 million.

Reduced Dependency On IT

Evidence and data. Interviewees explained that their organizations’ FP&A and HR teams relied on IT to create and update reports prior to using Workday Adaptive Planning. Some organizations developed internal tools to connect disparate data sources while others purchased advanced data solutions to manage their needs. With Workday Adaptive Planning, data ownership and management shifted to FP&A and HR teams, allowing these core users to self-serve and sunset legacy spreadsheets as well as repurpose IT time to other business priorities.

• The senior manager, workforce planning and intelligence at the manufacturing organization shared two examples:

  • “Since we’ve deployed [Adaptive Planning], we sunset two legacy tools. These were two internal legacy applications that have been developed, both with full-time support behind them, including a technical person and a full-time head for each dedicated to support. I know we’ve saved at least two FTEs worth of spending, plus all the other indirect spending that comes with keeping applications alive and enhancing them.”
  • “We were able to also sunset around 2,500 planning spreadsheets. A random person in the business used to maintain these spreadsheets and had the unfortunate job of managing them. The problem has always been that teams don’t talk to each other. They had to individually pull their data and their source data from HR systems. That’s been the biggest value add for us, which is to take the administration out of data connections in these spreadsheets and absorb those responsibilities with just five people on my small team.”

• The senior director, head of finance transformation at the real estate financial services organization said: “Adaptive Planning is the sweet point where it is sophisticated enough to handle your business but not overly complicated, such that you can train the team within 40 hours. It’s very low code. The FP&A team is more on a self-service model where they’re building their own reports and dimensions.”

• The head of commercial finance at the legal services organization said: “We have an internal business intelligence team who usually provides the performance tracking data to our lawyers. They run on an old sprint-based methodology within their teams — even if you want to change the name of a column header in one of those reports, you’re looking at minimum six weeks of turnaround before they can do it. Whereas in Adaptive, because we can control ourselves, we could spit up a whole new dashboard in an hour.

Modeling and assumptions. For the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization, Forrester assumes:

• Two IT FTEs, who supported data needs for finance and HR teams, are reallocated to other activities.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for an IT team member is $160,000.

Risks. This benefit may vary among organizations depending on:

• The extent to which IT was involved in supporting data needs for HR or finance teams.

• IT salaries.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $716,000.

Optimized Strategic Decision-Making

Evidence and data. According to Forrester research, the value of a modern platform is measured in margin improvement and market agility, beyond the time saved.⁶ As their organizations’ FP&A and HR teams realized efficiencies in their daily activities, they shifted focus and spent more effort on advising the business on strategic opportunities. Interviewees shared examples of operational cost savings, by way of retiring unused or redundant software licenses, as well as revenue impacts, by using data insights to target new business opportunities.  

• The head of commercial finance at the legal services organization said: “We did a focused rates review by looking at clients who have not had rate increases for many years — then started to increase those and implement annual inflationary increase. This was an initiative driven by my team that we never had time for before.”

• The senior director, head of finance transformation at the real estate financial services organization noted similar instances.

  • On cost savings impacts, they shared: “We’ve been able to identify a couple of SaaS-based tools that overlap in use. We have been able to consolidate and get some savings there as well as [data on] user count. How many users are using this contract or using this tool, why do we have this many licenses? So some of that has been put under the microscope now that we have details at the vendor level on the spend side.”
  • On revenue impacts, they said: “We’ve had two specific cases where we’ve changed the direction of where we’re headed as a business through the level of clarity and insights that Adaptive Planning has provided. [This includes] either reinvesting more in this business to make it a bit more profitable, or understanding that margins aren’t as good as we thought.”

• The senior manager of workforce planning and intelligence at the manufacturing organization said: “We are in a bad habit where we lay off people in one job skill and then hire [another employee with] the same skill in another business. To have total insight into our overall skills has been beneficial for us. We still have a long way to go, but I know it has helped. For example, we had a temporary facility set up in the past year. It was only meant to be a temporary location, and we migrated a ton of talent to work at this remote site. As part of our sunset plan, we had to move them back to our permanent factory. We did use Adaptive Planning to do a burndown or a reconciliation plan of every month to understand who the people were and track employee movement.”

• The HR director at the financial services organization said: “We’re looking at capacity models and asking, “Do we have the right number of recruiters based on our open recs and open positions?” This is starting to help us be more efficient. Do we have the right people in the right segments for recruiting?”

Modeling and assumptions. For the financial analysis as applied to the composite organization, Forrester assumes:

• It has an annual revenue of $1 billion, which grows 2% annually.

• With Workday Adaptive Planning, annual revenue increases by 0.08%.

• It has an operating margin of 12%.

• With Workday Adaptive Planning, the composite also saves $300,000 in business operating expenses.

Risks. This benefit may vary among organizations depending on:

• Annual revenues, operating margins, and growth strategies.

• The specific use cases and intent of Workday Adaptive Planning, particularly whether to focus on revenue generating initiatives or cost saving initiatives.  

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.7 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Data integrity and auditability improvements. According to Forrester research, FP&A professionals still use spreadsheets for some tasks, which creates a “shadow IT” infrastructure that may be familiar to users, but undermines data governance and is prone to errors. The interviewees explained that by centralizing and storing data in Adaptive Planning, forecast accuracy improved. This led to more effective and confident conversations with executives and improved as well as enabled more efficient audit practices.
  The head of commercial finance at the legal services organization said: “It is quite crucial that the numbers are accurate. In our previous spreadsheet world, I would be preparing to present our month-end or budget numbers to executives thinking I knew what the numbers were, but then I’d open the spreadsheet and suddenly they’ve changed. That never made me feel comfortable. With Adaptive Planning, I have the ability to lock the forecast and I know that it is backed up with a version of truth. That’s given me so much peace of mind just knowing that I’ve got that sort of control over the forecast.”

• Data security improvements. In addition to accuracy improvements, interviewees also stressed the importance of having improved data access across their organization. By assigning appropriate controls to certain user groups, interviewees noted that their organizations could better control how data moved throughout various departments. The senior director, head of finance transformation at the real estate financial services organization said: “If anything, [security] is better because before in spreadsheets everyone had access to everything. Now, we’re able to give access controls depending on the user’s role.”

• Cohesive relationship between HR and finance teams. Improved data integrity, auditability, and control leads to less friction and back and forth between the organizations’ HR and finance departments. The HR director at a financial services organization said: “The planned severance schedule or planned separation schedule is kept in Adaptive and that is what we execute against. Finance used to feel like HR was hiding people, but [this concern has been eliminated]. Nobody ever questions the schedule now. There’s full auditability and all models are kept for us to compare against.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Workday Adaptive Planning and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Explore current and new AI functionality. Interviewees shared anticipation for their organizations to further adopt current and expected AI capabilities within the Adaptive platform. The group head of planning cloud ERP at the media organization said: “We participated in the early adopter program for variance analysis, Workday AI, and the [predictive forecaster]. A couple users have started to adopt these features. We want to push adoption forward next year. The goal is for users to introduce [these features] into their daily routine.”
  The senior manager of workforce planning and intelligence at the manufacturing organization said, “I was just invited to use Planning Agent with limited availability. We’re really interested in exploration.”

• Scale use for business users. Interviewees commented on their organizations’ plan to evolve how business users gain value from Workday Adaptive Planning. The head of commercial finance at a legal services organization said: “My team currently models and sets targets to understand who we’ve currently got employed. We also consider the recruitment plans for the year, the additional people we intend to hire, the targets we are going to assign to people, and then the rates they are going to be charged out at. In the future, we want to allow the team leaders to have access to the input sheets within Adaptive so they can do that as homework before a budget meeting.”

• Expand integrations. Interviewees shared plans for configuring new integrations into Workday Adaptive Planning to explore additional use cases and drive further efficiencies. The senior director, head of finance transformation at the real estate financial services organization said: “We have plans of integrating Salesforce to do sales pipeline and forecasting. Having more APIs that are compatible with known CRMs, data warehouses, and cloud providers is definitely going to provide benefits when interconnecting these tools together.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).