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Workday Adaptive Planning

Texans Credit Union Adapts to Market Fluctuations with Workday Adaptive Planning

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How do you provide budgeting and forecasting answers on-the-fly in real-time with spreadsheets? You don’t. This is why Texans Credit Union switched from spreadsheets to Workday Adaptive Planning for streamlined and more efficient budgeting, forecasting and reporting.

Texans Credit Union, founded in 1953 by 11 Texas Instruments employees, now serves over 117,000 members. Its mission is to improve the well-being of all Texans. The organization is a full-service, not-for-profit institution with members throughout the Dallas Fort Worth area.

“A budget built on a series of spreadsheets was not appropriate for a business of our size and complexity,” said Ben Hart, CFO, Texans Credit Union. “Our biggest challenge was that we couldn’t easily pivot and change things on-the-fly.”

Texans Credit Union partnered with Revelwood to build a Workday Adaptive Planning-based budgeting and planning model that included personnel, CapEx and revenue. The data flows into a dashboard for easy visualization. 

The budgeting and planning model enables Texans to see actuals at a department level and branch level. “Adaptive is a very intuitive and flexible solution,” stated Hart. “Revelwood was very creative in how they implemented Adaptive for Texans. We had weekly meetings with Revelwood where they would share their knowledge and even go through technical details with us.”

Interested in learning the full story? Read the success story to learn how Texans benefits from Workday Adaptive Planning.

Read more blog posts on Workday Adaptive Planning:

FP&A Done Right: Forecasting Revenue for Services-Based Businesses: A Growth Factor

FP&A Done Right: ESG – An Imperative for Growth

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BARC Score Report Ranks IBM & Workday as Leaders in Integrated Planning & Analytics

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The 2022 BARC Score named IBM and Workday as leaders in Integrated Planning & Analytics. BARC (Business Analytics Research Center) is one of Europe’s leading analyst firms for business software, focusing on the areas of data, business intelligence (BI) and analytics, corporate performance management (CPM), enterprise content management (ECM), customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

This BARC Score report focuses on the market for integrated planning and analytics (IP&A) products and portfolios. 

“Today, the reality in many companies is that IP&A is an often proclaimed but seldom achieved goal. Reasons such as internal policies or difficulties with historically grown system landscapes could account for this … However, the lack of coherence of data and functionality resulting from using multiple tools for planning and analytics, and using Excel instead of specialized software tools, are frequently cited reasons for user dissatisfaction, inconsistencies and error susceptibility with planning and analytics in companies today,” writes BARC.

BARC Score – IBM

BARC assessed several components of IBM’s “comprehensive portfolio of on-premises and cloud analytics and performance management solutions,” which includes IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson and IBM Planning Analytics with Watson. The BARC Score states:

  • IBM Planning Analytics offers flexibility for business power users to create budgeting, planning and forecasting as well as analytics applications based on a high-performance in-memory database.
  • Comprehensive Excel-based functionality for preparing individual applications in IBM Planning Analytics (modeling, custom planning forms, etc.) and publishing them to the web.

BARC Score – Workday

This report focuses on Workday Analytics Planning, describing it as “a business-user-oriented CPM platform with functionality for various performance management processes.” BARC lists the following among the strengths for Workday Adaptive Planning:

  • Flexibility for a wide variety of planning approaches (centralized top-down, decentralized bottom-up) and planning topics (including operational planning and financial planning) aimed at companies of all sizes and industries.
  • According to feedback in BARC’s “The Planning Survey,” customers are very satisfied with Workday Adaptive Planning, its price to value and its planning and workflow functionality. 

BARC Score Inclusion Criteria

BARC has two categories for being included in this report: 

  • The vendor’s products and portfolios
  • Financial results relating to those products

Vendors included in the report must have functionality for planning, as well as:

  • Formatting reporting
  • Ad hoc query and reporting
  • Analysis 
  • Dashboards

All vendors must generate a minimum of 20 million EUR of software revenue per year, have a presence in Europe and in at least two additional geographies. The product must also have a significant number of implementations.Learn more about BARC’s assessment of IBM Planning Analytics and Workday Adaptive Planning. Download your copy today.

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Utilizing Split Row and Allocation Timespan

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Did you know Workday Adaptive Planning makes it easy to split individuals between multiple departments within a personnel sheet? 

In our latest Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks video, Dave Miersch, Revelwood’s Practice Leader for Workday Adaptive Planning, demonstrates how to:

  • Ensure the columns in a personnel sheet are suitable to the areas you want them to be split to
  • Assign specific columns to be split
  • Do splits by levels and allocation percentages
  • Split individuals by multiple departments
  • Flex percentages up and down
  • Make the account structure to be reflective of new allocations, and more. 

Watch the video to learn how to allocate your personnel between different departments. 

Visit Revelwood’s Knowledge Center for our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks or sign up here to get our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks delivered directly to your inbox. Not sure where to start with Workday Adaptive Planning? Our team here at Revelwood can help! Contact us at info@revelwood.com for more information.

Learn more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Utilizing Split Rows in Modeled Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Check Boxes in Modeled Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Flexible Planning

Home » Workday Adaptive Planning » Page 11

The Cost of Spreadsheet Errors

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Using disconnected spreadsheets for forecasting, budgeting, planning and reporting creates a host of issues, including:

  • Wasting weeks every year manually consolidating a mass of individual spreadsheets
  • Inability to easily model potential future scenarios or answer what-if questions
  • Measuring actual spend against plan is a major chore
  • Talented finance staff spends too much time on low-level, non-value add activities.

These challenges are ongoing and exponential. The longer you rely on spreadsheets for “collaborative” planning, the higher the costs are. Most of these costs are “soft” costs – time, manpower, delays. But there are hard costs too – in the form of errors. Some of these errors might be small. Some might have a significant impact on your company. Here are a few examples:

Famous Spreadsheet Errors

J.P. Morgan’s “White Whale” debacle was a result of a spreadsheet user error. The firm was using Excel spreadsheets to model Value at Risk (VaR) for the Chief Investment Office. The model was built by copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another. Several cells in this model contained faulty equations due to a failed copy-and-paste process. This led the firm to severely underestimate the downside risk of one of its credit portfolios, which led to approximately $6.5 billion in losses and fines. 

The municipality of West Baraboo, Wisconsin, relied on spreadsheets to calculate how much its borrowing would cost. The spreadsheet had a sum that was missing one cell. This resulted in West Baraboo underestimating the total cost of a 10-year bond, meaning the village had to pay $400,000 more interest on the bond than it originally thought.

Lazard, Ltd. Is an investment bank that advised SolarCity Corp. The bank had a computational error in a spreadsheet. This error led Lazard to discount the value of SolarCity Corp by $400 million. This happened when Tesla Motors Inc. was purchasing SolarCity Corp.

When Vista Equity Partners purchased Tibco Software, Tibco shareholders received $100 million less than originally anticipated. This was a result of a spreadsheet error that overstated Tibco’s equity value.

The chances might be slim of your company suffering one of these financial disasters. But if you are still relying on spreadsheets for forecasting, budgeting, planning and reporting, you are likely to be experiencing one – if not many – of the nine circles of spreadsheet hell. 

What are they? Download this eBook, The Nine Circles of Spreadsheet Hell, to learn them – and the hidden costs of spreadsheets. 

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Creating an Excel File Data Source

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Did you know you can create an Excel file spreadsheet data source for Workday Adaptive Planning?

Watch Dave Miersch, Revelwood’s Practice Leader for Workday Adaptive Planning, demonstrate how to create and use an Excel file as a data source for Adaptive Planning. Dave shows you how to:

  • Use any data source, such as from an ERP system or data warehouse
  • Create a new data source
  • Find and select the spreadsheet option
  • Name the data source
  • Import the spreadsheet

Adaptive Planning makes it very easy to import and export an Excel spreadsheet!

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Integration and the Planning Data Source

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Utilizing Split Rows in Modeled Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Integration and the Excel Spreadsheet Data Source

Home » Workday Adaptive Planning » Page 11

FP&A Done Right: Forecasting Revenue for Services-Based Businesses: A Growth Factor

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More than half of professional services firms can’t forecast project revenue beyond six months. Workday’s Mark David and Justin Joseph share insights into how organizations can get revenue forecasting right, even when business is anything but usual.

What is it about revenue forecasting that can be so challenging? For people-based industries such as professional services, their project revenue is based on talent supply. And people—including all 109 billion of them who have ever lived on Earth—can be difficult to predict. 

“People are highly variable,” said Justin Joseph, senior director of product strategy at Workday. “They aren’t always available. They go on vacation. And, as we’ve experienced the past few years, people leave, and there can be skills shortages. So there’s a lot of variability in how professional services companies generate project revenue.”

Beyond the variability of their employees and the impact of unprecedented trends and events, professional services firms also deal with different systems in different parts of the organization. These silos can cause data to be inconsistent and inaccurate—challenges that only get worse as an organization grows.

“The larger an organization, the more complex things get,” said Mark David, vice president of solution management at Workday. “Organizations then become more reliant on processes to manage projects and people, but that requires accurate data from disparate places.”

In this episode of the Workday Podcast, we’re 100% focused on revenue forecasting for professional services, with guests Joseph and David. They share trends impacting firms, the pros and cons of different types of forecasting, and how firms can start to solve their challenges to better plan and forecast.  

Here are a few highlights of our conversation, edited for clarity. Be sure to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, and remember you can find our entire podcast catalog here.  

  • “The reason most companies can’t forecast their revenue more accurately is because they have different systems and data across their lines of businesses and services. And all those different systems mean that you have data that’s going to be wildly inconsistent. You’ll need a lot of integrations to pull this data together to make sure that you have an end-to-end process for revenue forecasting.” —Justin Joseph
  • “A year ago, a customer who runs a 5,000-employee professional services firm told me the one thing he needed was a good revenue forecast more than anything else right now. As you can imagine, this was especially needed with what’s happened over the last few years, which have made forecasting where your business is going even more difficult.” —Mark David
  • “With unexpected scenarios, you’re following the exact same processes as expected scenarios, but you have to forecast at a much faster pace and much more frequently because your assumptions are changing so rapidly, maybe hour by hour or day by day. How quickly can you pull this data together and then model it and share it out? It may sound contradictory, but they’re similar. Speed is ultimately what’s different.” —Justin Joseph

This blog post was originally published on the Workday Adaptive Planning blog.

Read more FP&A Done Right posts:

FP&A Done Right: The Changing Role of the CFO

FP&A Done Right: Financial Forecasting Processes that Guide Business Strategy

FP&A Done Right: Continuous Planning Leads to Agile Businesses

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Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Data Integration and the Planning Data Source

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Did you know that Workday Adaptive Planning integrations can use the metadata in Adaptive Planning as a part of the integration?

It’s true! The process requires setting up the credential and setting up a data source for Adaptive Planning. You must have the proper credentials yourself within Adaptive Planning to set this up.

To set up the credential you will need to do the following:

From the Workday navigation button, go to Integration🡪Design Integrations

You will arrive at the following screen. Under the Component Library section click on the Credentials option.

From the list that is presented, the first option is to Create a new Credential, select this.

Once clicked, the following list will be presented, select Planning Credential, and give it a name. Giving it a name that is meaningful matters, Adaptive certainly fits the bill here.

Once created, you will see that your credential exists under credentials in the Component Pane, but no access to the data source has been granted yet because no authorized user has been assigned. To assign an authorized user (a user with the rights to perform all these steps) to the credentials, you follow the on-screen instructions and click “Authorize” under the Actions panel.

When you click authorize, the following appears, enter the credentials in the pop-up screen and click “Authorize” on the lower right-hand portion of the screen.

Next you will want to click the Save button to save the login information with the credential.

The next step will be to Test the connection. This is done by clicking on “Test Connection” under the Actions pane. A pop-up window will display, click on “Test.” If the login credentials are valid, the following window will appear and the credential is all set up.

To set up the data source, you will need to do the following:

Under the Component Library, click on Data Sources.

Click on the option “Create New Data Source.”

Here again select Planning Data Source and give it a meaningful name, keeping the name the same in this example and calling it Adaptive.

Once the Data Source is created, the following screen will appear. Here you will assign the Data Source the Credential that was created in step 1 and save it.

You will notice that no tables have appeared. That is because we have not defined them yet.

On the left-hand side under Actions, click on “Manage Sources.”

The following popup window will appear, click on the sources folder first, then click on the Add button.

You will now see a list; in the example we will import metadata about Accounts and Levels. Those two will be selected.

You have the option to rename the source, so Accounts and Levels will be used in place of the default name.

No tables are in the Data Source yet because the Data Source needs to be saved and the structure needs to be imported. Click the Save option first followed by “Import Structure.”

The table structures are now present as seen below.

The next step is to import the data, this is done by clicking “Import Data” under the Actions pane.

That’s all it takes to set up the credential and the Adaptive Data Source, now you’re ready to utilize it in the Staging area for integration however you see fit!

Visit Revelwood’s Knowledge Center for our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks or sign up here to get our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks delivered directly to your inbox. Not sure where to start with Workday Adaptive Planning? Our team here at Revelwood can help! Contact us info@revelwood.com for more information.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Revenue Cohort Modeling

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Check Boxes in Modeled Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Show Actuals for Linked Accounts

Home » Workday Adaptive Planning » Page 11

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Utilizing Split Rows in Modeled Sheets

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Do you know how to utilize splits in Workday Adaptive Planning for a modeled sheet? Splits allow you to have multiple lines as part of one record and you can set splits on a column-by-column basis. 

A use case might be a personnel model in which you want the ability to allocate a single employee to multiple departments. To turn on splits, navigate to the settings of your modeled sheet and click “Columns and Levels.”

From here, click on the “Sheet Properties” button

Within the pop-up menu, click on “Settings” then enable “Allow Splits” and hit “OK”

Once this is completed, you will notice each column now has a checkbox for “Split.” In this example we will turn this on for the “Department” and “Allocation” columns.

Within our sheet we have an existing row for John Smith. In order to create split rows we just have to right-click on John Smith’s row and select “Split Row.” 

Once the split row is added you will see that only the two columns we designated with splits are split. The information from the consolidated row gets carried down to the split rows for the non-split columns.

In this example I will create two split rows. I’d like to allocate John Smith to two departments. After adding a second two split row, updating the information, and saving the sheet, you will now see two split rows that are each allocated 50% to their department and a consolidated row that totals up to a 100% allocation.

You could have accomplished the same end result with multiple independent rows, however, splits provide several benefits including:

  • Non-split columns will automatically copy the consolidated row data to the split rows.
  • Split rows are grouped together.
  • Groupings show the summations of split column values, in this example you can see the allocation percentages add up to 100%. Independent rows would not clearly show you an employee is allocated 100%.

Visit Revelwood’s Knowledge Center for our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks or sign up here to get our Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks delivered directly to your inbox. Not sure where to start with Workday Adaptive Planning? Our team here at Revelwood can help! Contact us info@revelwood.com for more information.

Read more Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks:

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Check Boxes in Modeled Sheets

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Show Actuals for Linked Accounts

Workday Adaptive Planning Tips & Tricks: Override Formulas

Home » Workday Adaptive Planning » Page 11