As the business world becomes more unpredictable, outdated planning methods are no longer sufficient, hence the need to adopt a more agile and modern approach.
Financial planning has always been a high-risk, high-reward activity that relies heavily on educated guesswork. As a result, disruptors in the industry are constantly looking for new ways to mitigate the risks and maximise the opportunities.
In such a volatile and unpredictable environment, innovative new technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning have emerged as highly promising solutions. The ultimate goal is to drive a shift away from educated guesswork to data-driven decision-making. However, given the sheer scale of today’s financial data sets, that is only possible with modern solutions that can make sense of massive amounts of data at machine speed.
Workday Adaptive Planning was developed to solve this problem and provide financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams with the insights they need to plan effectively.
What is Workday Adaptive Planning?
Workday is an industry-leading financial management platform. Adaptive Planning is one of its core components. A powerful analytics engine, Adaptive Planning turns operational data into actionable insights to drive informed decision-making.
In 2020, Workday Adaptive Planning received a major update with the embedding of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence functions to facilitate predictive forecasting based on historical data and current trends.
Workday Dashboard, the perfect tool to create your custom reports on data.
Other updates to the platform include Dashboard, which for Workday Adaptive Planning, allows you to monitor and drive business performance by visualising charts and numbers side-by-side. Furthermore, when data is entered into sheets, your charts will be updated dynamically, allowing you to analyse real-time financial and operational data with ease.
Intelligent and effortless forecasting made easy with Workday new modelling functions.
How does this help finance leaders?
At its heart, Workday Adaptive Planning is a collaborative platform that provides finance teams with in-depth insights that help them make informed and timely decisions. This includes intelligent forecasting and modelling across multidimensional scenarios. By connecting every financial data system to the platform, finance departments can plan across any time horizon, boost collaboration and adoption, and add value with smarter, better-informed budgeting.
As a cloud-based solution, it largely automates financial planning processes and facilitates the creation of sophisticated financial models without the hassle of having to manage huge spreadsheets.
Particularly in larger enterprises, financial planning can become a massive burden due to the need to span operations across a range of business functions and departments. Data often ends up being siloed, which means it is not readily accessible for analytics. By consolidating financial data and applying machine learning-driven analytics, Workday Adaptive Planning facilitates a more collaborative environment and ensures plans are more closely aligned with your organisation’s current goals.
In today’s rapidly changing economy, the need for agility cannot be understated. Traditional approaches to planning lack agility, largely because they rely on outdated legacy software and cumbersome manual processes. However, Workday Adaptive Planning extensively uses flexible modelling and real-time data analytics to empower enterprise planning that can continuously develop in line with ever-changing needs and market variables. For example, AI can make accurate revenue predictions from historical and real-time data in mere minutes. By contrast, the manual analysis of vast data sets can take weeks and months, and it soon becomes a practical impossibility at scale.
In conclusion, machine learning and artificial intelligence are constantly advancing to deliver a faster time to value and better meet the needs of today’s financial markets. Workday Adaptive Planning is one such solution that promises to transform financial and enterprise planning for reduced risks and higher rewards.
Coreteam helps enterprises get more out of their Workday deployments with tailored success plans and dependable guidance. Contact us today to start transforming your business.