The primary benefits of adaptive planning

If you're still using spreadsheets for your business plans, or are making strategic decisions sans comparisons data, you're already behind. To bring your financials, workforce, and sales planning up to date, you need to sign on with Workday Adaptive Planning. What's more, if you implement the transformative system through the consulting firm Mercer, you'll also gain access to data that can help you make better decisions.

Read on for the primary benefits of adaptive planning.

What is Adaptive Planning?

Workday Adaptive Planning is a platform that organizations can use to quickly adapt to evolving business conditions, fostering an active planning process that involves the entire company. It's selling point is that regardless of models' complexities, or how much data are involved, you can still plan for what's coming. Agility is king.

What are Some of its Functions?

In the main, Adaptive Planning - formerly Adaptive Insights - has all-in-one capabilities for forecasting, budgeting, consolidation, reporting, business intelligence and dashboards. What does that mean for you? For all intents and purposes, it means that your company's leaders can get a leg up on rivals by making improved, quicker, and more collaborative decisions.

What Do Reviews Say?

Sometimes you must go straight to the people who use a product to gain insightful feedback. In this case, users recently chimed in on Workday Adaptive Planning for Trust Radius.

One such user, a director of finance, said the system organizes a large amount of data in a very accessible way, and that it is easy to learn. It also makes it easy to modify or change formulas, the reviewer said. Another user, a director of accounting, said the system handles forecasts easily and is efficient. Then there's the senior finance director who called the model's overall structure powerful and simple. He also described the reporting tools as world-class.

What are Some Benefits if I Go Through Mercer?

While Workday Adaptive Planning is a standalone tool that you can purchase separately, technology alone won't save you. Buying and deploying the system through Mercer can get you the most from your investment. Why try to go it alone, only to overwhelm your already-stretched IT department and cause delays that eat into your ROI?

If you go with Mercer, you'll not only get the formidable tool that is Adaptive Planning, but you will also be availed of the consultant's powerful datasets that can help you make on-point decisions that are based on up-to-date and pertinent info.

What else? Well, in terms of agility, you'll be able to create flexible modeling for workforce ratios, sales capacity and viable finances. And that's not to mention the available comparable data.

The benefits of going through Mercer for Adaptive Planning for financials includes the ability to come up with disparate scenarios in an instant and assess multiple proposals with no manual tracking or do-overs.

In the workforce planning department, you'll be able to, say, see whether your organization has the staff to carry it through next year or even the next few years. You'll be able to learn what positions are lacking, whether training is necessary, and what the tab might be.

As for sales planning, your booking targets and quotas won't be derailed by a team member change, and you'll be able to see if there are areas or industries that need new people. You'll also be able to easily update plans should there be a headcount or economic change.

Now that you know the primary benefits of adaptive planning, you can look forward to losing the spreadsheets and your company's clunky old systems. You can also anticipate better and faster decisions, because of the agility the new system provides. However, you won't experience Adaptive Planning's true value unless you implement it through a consultant. We prefer Mercer.