This is a guest post from Ardeshir Ghanbarzadeh, senior director of product marketing at our partner, Incorta. Ardeshir explains how the integration between Workday Adaptive Planning and Incorta helps FP&A leaders uncover opportunities, while also increasing accuracy.

FP&A leaders looking to increase the accuracy of forecasts and budgets need a comprehensive and detailed view of the financial and operational data that drives the business, and the ability to analyze this data, inform stakeholders and take appropriate action. However, many organizations today are challenged with the complexities of accessing complete, business-ready data from disparate sources in a timely and cost-effective way.

These challenges include:

• Accessing complete data from multiple operational and financial systems
• Identifying supply chain, inventory and cashflow bottlenecks in real time
• Visibility to transactional details to analyze variances, trends and anomalies
• Leveraging AI/ML to increase productivity and forecasting accuracy

Adding to these operational challenges are headwinds from today’s business and economic climate that have every organization looking to reduce costs without sacrificing productivity or growth.

Incorta bridges the data gap and puts an end to the disjointed data experience by bringing together detailed, transaction-level data from Point-of-Sale, inventory, workforce, supply chain, ERP and financial systems including GL and subledger details, enabling FP&A teams to virtually eliminate guesswork and build highly accurate forecasting models. And since Incorta does not rely on traditional ETL processes and time-consuming batch loads, FP&A teams can access the latest actuals in minutes to quickly adjust forecasts and plans and stay on track to meet financial and operational objectives.

With the freedom to drill down into subledger details to investigate the veracity of topline metrics, variances and you can identify the key metrics that have a material financial and budgetary impact.

Adjust Plans with Ease

In a business environment where plans and forecasts are constantly changing, FP&A teams need immediate and granular visibility to new data to quickly respond and make adjustments that keep plans aligned with business strategy. However, limitations on data access combined with visibility to only topline metrics, aggregate values or subsets of data introduces uncertainty into the planning process. Incorta eliminates the complexities of accessing detailed data from ERP systems and business applications by quickly connecting and bringing together 100% of your financial and operational data, making it instantly available to Workday Adaptive Planning users for analysis.

Dramatically Better Forecasts

In the absence of complete, timely data organizations are forced to forecast and plan based on assumptions and experience. While some may be very good at this guessing game, it can lead to wide variances that negatively affect both operational efficiency and project budgets.

FP&A teams using Workday Adaptive Planning significantly increase the accuracy of their forecasts and budgets when using Incorta. With access to multisource transactional-level details from across the enterprise, users can drill any direction to analyze and identify anomalies, trends and operational bottlenecks that introduce risks and uncertainty into the forecasting and planning processes.

Embracing AI-lead Analysis

While the philosophical debate on whether AI will lead to humanity’s destruction or nirvana continues, knowledge workers need to leverage the capabilities of AI and machine learning tools and their benefits. AI-driven analysis of data at scale speeds up analysis by quickly finding anomalies, identifying areas of risk or even uncovering new opportunities that could take months to discover manually. Although AI insights are only as good as the data used to train, tune and deploy these capabilities. Inaccurate or partial datasets used to create ML models can lead to false predictions. In order to avoid this dilemma, data teams can uplevel their AI projects for FP&A with the benefit of complete, multisource data to support ML models and advanced analytics.

Whether your organization relies on data from multiple ERP or EPM solutions, inventory management, operational or financial systems, Incorta can simplify access and delivery of complete, transaction-level data to Workday Adaptive Planning users at record speed so you can create a consistent experience for FP&A teams that drives continuous improvement of the planning and budgeting process.

In summary, Incorta helps Workday Adaptive Planning users:

• Increase the accuracy of P&L models, workforce plans, and scenario analysis.
• Get immediate access to detailed data from multiple POS, CRM, GL, inventory and operational systems.
• Drill into subledger details to investigate variances and identify drivers with financial impact.
• Eliminate guesswork with instant access to the latest actuals, quickly adjust forecasts and align scenario plans.

This blog post was originally published on the Incorta blog.

Read more about Data Analytics in Finance:

Bringing Operational Analytics to the Office of Finance

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