More Scale, Resilience, and Flexibility
We believe one of the strengths that helped set Workday apart is the increased scalability and performance capabilities our Elastic Hypercube Technology has brought to Workday Adaptive Planning. I had the privilege of heading the team that developed this breakthrough, which has made Workday Adaptive Planning an ideal fit for larger enterprises by delivering greater scale and resilience in more complex planning environments.
More than 600 large enterprises are currently developing plans, budgets, forecasts, what-if scenarios, and more with Workday Adaptive Planning. They include brands such as American Family Insurance, Denny’s, IBM, and South Shore Health.
We also believe that our recognition/position as a Leader position is bolstered by the unique flexibility of Workday Adaptive Planning: We offer a best-in-class planning solution for customers who want to do company-wide planning across finance, sales, workforce, or other operational planning areas.
For customers who want to take advantage of additional Workday enterprise cloud applications, a seamless user experience on a world-class, unified platform awaits. Some 20% of our more than 5,200 planning customers can plan, execute, and analyze on one application platform. This helps them achieve true business agility.
Innovations Score with Customers
Customers the world over have responded positively to innovations we’ve introduced, such as:
- Active dashboards, which allow users to enter data onto a sheet and immediately see the results of that change graphically on the same dashboard.
- Granular access rules, which make it easier to extend planning to more users by controlling access to accounts and dimensions.
- Anomaly detection, a machine-learning-powered breakthrough that allows planners to easily identify and detect errors in their planning data.
- Federated planning, which allows separate functional teams to plan individually using their own models, which then come together into a holistic corporate plan.
Company-wide planning requires software that’s easy to use, a real advantage at a time when more employees are collaborating remotely. This is one of the strengths our customers note frequently and consistently. And since ease of use drives adoption, Workday Adaptive Planning makes it easy for our partners such as Deloitte, Accenture, McKinsey & Company, and PwC to help large enterprises get the most from their deployments.
Planning Is Evolving to Solve Advanced Problems
Today’s organizations are facing increasingly complex challenges, and they need advanced planning solutions. This was true before the pandemic, and that reality has only intensified since. Planning has evolved from an annual, episodic, largely manual, and siloed process to one that’s continuous, comprehensive, and collaborative. It’s advanced from high-level, top-line views to detailed functional and departmental plans that are fully integrated with the corporate plan. It’s matured from basic spreadsheet planning into an intelligent, agile, and highly visual environment powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence that automatically scours data to detect potential outliers that could lead to errant predictions—and that accelerates insight by instantly visualizing data so anyone can identify important trends and patterns.
That’s modern planning. And it’s the foundation for recovering not just from this current disruption, but for preparing for disruptions to come. That’s the view from Workday customers like ChristianaCare, where Director of Financial Planning and Operational Analysis Kevin Kain is facing the future with confidence. His outlook says it all: “We’re ready for what’s next.”
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*Adaptive Insights was acquired by Workday in 2018.