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Workday Adaptive Planning

Revelwood’s Customer Care Offering: Advantage Services

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Do you know about Revelwood’s Advantage Services program? It consists of an annual, discounted block of hours and priority support with Revelwood’s IBM Planning Analytics and TM1 experts or Revelwood’s Workday Adaptive Planning experts.

The Advantage Services program enables you to:

  • Use the hours as needed for support, development or training
  • Forecast support costs for the year
  • Have a repository of support tickets through the length of your Advantage Services contract
  • Have Revelwood analyze your support tickets to make proactive recommendations
  • Receive discounted services hours, making your support dollars go farther

We offer four Advantage Services options to meet your needs – Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze. Premium plans include an annual Business Review and Roadmap discussion. We also have an SMB option for smaller businesses. 

And, you do not need to be an existing Revelwood client to participate in the program!

Interested in learning more about our Advantage Services program? Contact John Pra Sisto.

Learn more about Revelwood’s Customer Care offerings:

Revelwood Customer Care: Staff Augmentation for IBM Planning Analytics

Revelwood Customer Care: Health Check & Business Process Review for IBM Planning Analytics

Home » Workday Adaptive Planning » Page 9

Apex Entertainment Performs Enterprise Planning with Workday Adaptive Planning

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How do you move away from spreadsheet-based budgeting, forecasting and reporting for more insight into the operations of the business? With Workday Adaptive Planning.  

Apex Entertainment, headquartered in Marlborough, MA, operates four family entertainment centers in the northeast U.S., including Virginia Beach, Syracuse, Albany and Marlborough. Apex offers attractions that are fun for all ages, with activities such as Indoor Go Karts, Bowling, Laser Tag, Escape Rooms, Ropes Courses, Arcade and Redemption, Sports Simulators, Axe Throwing, Mini Gold, Bumper Cars, Virtual Reality and state-of-the-art event meeting space. Each location offers a full-service dining experience in The Pit Stop Tavern, with a menu that includes 80 gluten-free options as well as vegetarian options. 

“Relying on Microsoft Excel to manage our financial processes handicapped us more than helped us,” said Marcus Kemblowski, COO, Apex Entertainment. “We needed a solution that gave us insight into how to fix problems and would enable us to manage our business in real-time.” 

Apex Entertainment selected Workday Adaptive Planning and Revelwood. The goal of the implementation was to easily see how the business is doing, down to the location and the attraction. Now, with Workday Adaptive Planning, Apex Entertainment has the information available to make strategic decisions. The team can analyze and assess potential expenses regarding forecasted revenue by activity. 

“From the get-go, Revelwood clearly understood our business. They immediately knew what we were discussing and hot to get us to where we needed to go,” added Kemblowski.

Apex Entertainment is not done with its plans for Workday Adaptive Planning. “Workday Adaptive Planning can help us to get where we want to go,” commented Kemblowski. “We now can easily perform top-line to bottom-line budgeting and forecasting. The insights generated by the application are invaluable to the company’s growth.  

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

Read more blog posts on Workday Adaptive Planning:

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

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

Home » Workday Adaptive Planning » Page 9

Invaio Sciences Sows the Seeds of FP&A Transformation with Workday Adaptive Planning

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How do you reduce errors and increase accuracy in financial planning, forecasting and reporting? With Workday Adaptive Planning. 

Invaio Sciences, Inc., a Flagship Pioneering company, is headquartered in Cambridge, MA. Invaio is striving to accelerate the leap to a more nature-positive era for agriculture by solving performance and delivery challenges of traditional chemical and biological crop protection.

Until recently, Invaio was using Microsoft Excel for its budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting needs. The manual nature of Excel – and the human error that comes with it – became too much of a burden for the company. 

Invaio is a privately held company that relies on private investments and debt financing until it becomes cash positive. The finance team needs to provide senior management with updated and accurate numbers to help management determine when the company needs to raise more money. 

Invaio selected Workday Adaptive Planning with Revelwood as its implementation partner. “A personal connection referred Revelwood to us,” said Ryan Garceau, head of operations & finance at Invaio. “As soon as we met the Revelwood team there was an instant rapport. We’ve since developed a great relationship between the Invaio finance team and the Revelwood team members. The Revelwood team was committed to making this project a big success.”

With its new Workday Adaptive Planning solution, Invaio now has a new approach to managing foreign transactions and financial reporting. “The way we do financial planning, forecasting and reporting are like night and day,” added Garceau. “We’ve gained efficiencies across the board, and we’ve changed the finance team’s value proposition. Our activities are no longer about building the reports, they are about analyzing the data.”

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

Read more blog posts on Workday Adaptive Planning:

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

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

Home » Workday Adaptive Planning » Page 9

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 9

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. 

Home » Workday Adaptive Planning » Page 9

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

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