If you’re looking to transform your finance processes or considering a Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) solution, this video explores criteria to consider and dives specifically into key traits of Workday Adaptive Planning that make it a popular choice.

This is part of the “FP&A Transformation 101: Your guide to FP&A solution implementations” video series, where we explore how to choose a Financial Planning and Analysis solution, who to involve, the role of vendors and partners, implementation methodology, costs and more. Explore the whole series here.

---

Evaluating FP&A tools and why Workday Adaptive Planning

In this episode, QMetrix Directors Brett Ruwoldt and David Huynh discuss aspects of FP&A tools before focusing on Workday Adaptive Planning specifically. They cover:

• are some FP&A solutions better than others?
• are these solutions owned by Finance or IT?
• why we choose to work with Workday Adaptive Planning
• what you get out-of-the-box with Workday Adaptive Planning
• can AI and LLMs do the same thing as FP&A solutions?

They also talk about how one of the most important criteria is that a tool should be “usable” by the finance team and wider business.

Note: Whether it’s Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), Corporate Performance Management (CPM) or Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) systems, we are referring to similar things here – they are technology solutions primarily used by the finance team that aid with planning and organisational performance management.

Watch the video or listen to the conversation here:

Read here for a transcript of the video:

Pros and cons of different FP&A tools

[Watch at 00:00]

Brett Ruwoldt (Brett): So Dave, we work in the FP&A space and there’s several technology or solutions if you like, that businesses can implement. They would obviously go through a process of evaluating such solutions. But perhaps do you want to share a little bit about technology we implement and what are the perhaps the pros and cons of that solution?

David Huynh (David): I mean, if you were to put in Google or I suppose even copilot or ChatGPT nowadays, like what are the the best CPM, EPM or tools out there at the moment? You’re going to get a whole host of them, and I think we’ve been in the game long enough now as well – all the vendors are going to say theirs is the best and they’re the be all and end all.

Why (we work with) Workday Adaptive Planning

[Watch at 01:02]

David: However, we do partner with Workday Adaptive Planning as our primary tool of choice to deploy for our clients. And mainly the reason for that is – what I like to think of is – the best tool is just one that gets adopted, one that’s used, right?

David: So the first thing that comes to mind is one of the pros certainly of Adaptive is its ease of use and user friendliness. It’s not a solution that, you know, is going to handle absolutely all situations. We’re certainly not arrogant enough to say, “Yeah, this is the be-all and end-all,” as I said before.

David: But, it is the easiest to use, easiest to adopt, and for our clients, we do tend to work with more finance people as opposed to IT – they don’t know programming or scripting or anything the like. They want something that’s going to be more Excel-like. One that they can actually maintain moving forward as well. So they want to be able to get their hands dirty, be able to build their own reports, as they should. And if they’re savvy enough, be able to even do their own modeling and so forth. So we, we promote that quite heavily, certainly with our clients, that it is a tool that they can own and maintain.

David: And both you and I, we’ve worked with many other tools, and we’ve seen a lot over the years, and it is still the one that I reckon that finance can own and maintain. And we’ve got obviously plenty of clients that are doing that right now.

Brett: Look, I think you’ve touched on a really important point there, that whilst having it be more like Excel or to have the look and feel of Excel is really one of the key benefits of Adaptive Planning, obviously, it’s got the smarts behind it. It doesn’t have the limitations of Excel. It’s going to reduce that resistance because they’re already familiar with Excel, and if they get access to an application that is very much like what they’re used to, then that’s going to reduce the barrier.

A “usable” tool for finance and the business

[Watch at 3:27]

Brett: When you say usability, do you mean for the everyday user that’s accessing the system, or do you mean someone that is perhaps the system administrator or perhaps someone that is an Excel guru? Where do you sort of see that?

David: Yeah. It’s a good question, and a lot of the times when FP&A professionals are going in to evaluate what tool they should go with, they’re usually evaluating one that’s – we all have our biases – but one that they can use and one that’s all very powerful and so forth. What they tend to forget is that you also need a tool to get others as part of the business to use. And when I say other parts of the business –the budget owners, the department managers, the cost center managers, and so forth.

David: They’re the ones that really have to get into the solution as well. It’s not just for the FP&A or finance team. So to answer that question, Brett, I think, you know, it’s even more important that the tool – there is familiarity, like you said, with Excel, and that the end users can see themselves using it, they’re comfortable with, it’s not overly complicated, and one that they’re readily able to log in, key in their budgets at the end of the day, be able to run their reports. But do it without that sort of friction, do that without any back to basics things falling over on them, or if they’re unable to get to the numbers that they need. Because if they don’t, you know what happens. They’ll just revert back to Excel.

Skills you need to own and manage a FP&A tool

[Watch at 5:19]

Brett: One of the questions we quite often get asked is – what sort of skills do you need to be able to own and manage something like Workday Adaptive Planning? And the way I sort of best interpret that is if you’re good at Excel modeling and you like to get into Excel and build models and formulas, then the learning curve to do that in Adaptive Planning is quite small. What are your thoughts on that?

David: Yeah that’s true. And the proof is in the consultants that we hire. So a lot of the team, our consultants, our delivery leads and so forth, they have background in accounting. They’ve worked in FP&A or they’ve worked as systems accountants. They don’t, they don’t come from an IT sort of background. They come from generally finance, and that means they’ve been able to bring their Excel skills and translate it quite easily to the solution and to Adaptive Planning.

(Read how this company scaled from doing FP&A in Excel to Workday Adaptive Planning, and now manage the entire solution in-house).

Getting the right fit: Adaptive Planning vs other solutions

[Watch at 6:22]

David: So, look, there’s others out there that are going to be more technical and they tend to be the ones that may have ultimate flexibility. You can do whatever you want in them and you can customise them to the nth degree.

David: One of the best things about Adaptive is the fact that it doesn’t try to do everything. It knows that it can’t. But what it can do, it does very well, and that’s suitable to 90% of situations out there.

Brett: When I think about our client base and the projects that we’ve done, it’s very rare that you come across a use case where Adaptive isn’t really a good fit, and we’d be the first to say if that’s not a good fit for Adaptive. But it’s a rare occurrence, and certainly in our 10 years of being an Adaptive Planning partner, I’d say that I could count that on less than one hand, in terms of the number of times I’ve had an issue with the use cases.

David: Yeah. Look, more often than not, it’s going to be the people and process that you need to factor in as well, right? So the tool or the technology can only take you so far, however, you can’t forget about the people and the process. So yes, if the technology can get you 89% of the way there, perhaps that last 10, 5% – it’s a slight tweak to the process.

What you get out-of-the-box with Workday Adaptive Planning

[Watch at 7:50]

Brett: If we think about Adaptive – and there’s a lot going to be some people that are listening to this that really have no idea what Workday Adaptive Planning is – so if you were to describe what you get out of the box with Adaptive versus what you actually have to configure in the solution, how would you best describe that?

David: In terms of what you get out of the box, so just keeping in mind, Workday Adaptive Planning was designed and built, for finance.

Brett: I think it was founded by an ex-CFO, wasn’t it? And he was so frustrated that there was no solution on the market that would actually do what he needed and have the flexibility that he needed. And he actually founded what was then Adaptive Insights. So yeah it’s an interesting story. But certainly from a finance perspective, he’s a CFO, so he knew how finance people view the world, and particularly in FP&A.

David: Yeah, with that in mind, being that one of the core founders being an ex-CFO, he obviously built the solution more geared towards finance.

David: So out of the box there’s key concepts around version, scenario management, forecasting, all those sort of components are out of the box. Even calling things out like the general ledger or the org structure. Things that are basic concepts – there’s actually dedicated components to handle that or modules that can be more specific to handle those situations.

David: So there’s things like even financial consolidations, things that we see a lot these days, and there’s organisations trying to do or improve their allocations. There’s an allocations module out of the box. There’s handling things like exchange rates – that’s all out of the box.

David: So even some of the reporting and the drag-and-drop nature of it, whilst yes, you have to build your own, but the concepts around month-to-date, year-to-date, those sort of things are sort of pre-built as part of the solution. So, I mean, I know we’ll get into that a bit later around, the time-to-value and how long it takes to implement but yeah, again, one of the reasons why we love the solution is that you just get a lot out of the box.

Brett: And so you can sort of hit the ground running when you’re working with the finance teams as to “what are your planning models that you’d like”. You don’t spend a lot of time building the basic building blocks that’s already there, and then you’re sort of just there to really add the value that you can as a consultant.

David: Even very basic things like the user interface. We don’t, as consultants, have to get involved on that one because the interface is already there. It’s designed, it’s more about the configuration side of things. So even something as small as that means that you can get that value quite quickly.

The most technical part: Integration

[Watch at 10:55]

Brett: And it’s probably fair to say – and we will cover integration in another topic on another day – but the integration’s probably the most technical aspect of any deployment, so integrating with the source system, typically the general ledger.

David: Yeah that’s probably as technical as it gets. I know generally when we deploy Adaptive there is a conversation with, say, the IT team. It’s usually a very, very simple conversation. I mean, most modern cloud solution these days, you can get access to the data, it’s REST API, all that. So most IT teams, to be honest, they’d rather finance maintain and own this. It’s one less system for them to add to their list where they’ve got to have oversight over. It’s really just that integration bit you know, to be honest, it’s pretty standard with any other cloud applications these days. It’s pretty straightforward.

(Explore integration with Workday Adaptive Planning.)

A finance-owned project and solution

[Watch at 11:58]

Brett: And I think that you touched on an important point there, Dave. When we’re having conversations about solutions in the space, we are typically positioning to the office of finance. Like IT are involved sometimes, but generally to a very limited degree.

Brett: So this is really a finance-owned project. In the main – and we’ll talk a little bit about what a project looks like and how you set yourself up for success – but it’s definitely a finance-led project as a rule. But obviously depending on the size of the project, you may have a PMO or something like that involved as well, but IT requirements and involvement is very limited.

David: Yeah. It’s limited and it’s minimal. It doesn’t need that sort of control. And one analogy to put it is – assume you’re deploying an Excel model – you’re not going to get IT involved when you are trying to deploy Excel spreadsheets as an example. It’s largely the same for, for Adaptive Planning.

Can AI and LLMs do the same things?

[Watch at 13:07]

Brett: So there’s probably one further question which I’ll ask, and probably the last one in this particular segment. You mentioned at the start about ChatGPT and Claude and those sort of large language models. So for someone that’s looking at improving their FP&A, what if they said, “Oh, I’m just going to get Claude to do that for me,” what would you say to them?

David: Be very careful around going through that approach. Depending on what you want to get out of Claude – but Claude still isn’t going to help you distribute and get other department managers to enter in their key inputs, right? I mean, there’s still that element of getting others to do their budgets, plans, and forecasts.

Brett: Claude – it’s going to need a source of truth for its data as well, and where is it going to get that from? So it potentially could traverse your ERP and your spreadsheets and all that, but really it does need a consolidated data foundation.

Brett: And if you think back to the ’90s – garbage in, garbage out – there’s no difference with that to what is today with these large language models. They need a source of truth which they can rely on to be able to do their best work.

David: Yeah, context is key. They still need that, that data, and it’s got to be right as well. I mean, obviously if you’re going to –

Brett: Data quality, absolutely …

David: if you’re going to be applying and leveraging AI over poor data, you’re going to get that, as you said before – garbage in, garbage out, right? You’ve got to be careful with that. But the way you’d go about it, I think it’s important, you just park that AI conversation part of it. You still need the basics. You still need good quality data. You still need good quality let’s say, modelling, out of your drivers.

David: Because if you think about it, the AI engine, when you ask it the questions of, “Why have I got this variance?” or “Can you help me explain this a little bit further” and try and double-click on a number, it’s going to draw back to that model. Right? So it wants to understand the non-financial drivers and so forth.

Brett: And I think you touched on an important point there, because there needs to be security around what you’re doing in that function. You can’t just have the data open to everyone and Claude just pulling payroll data out and representing that to everyone in the business. So you need to have a tightly controlled security model around that, and I’m not too sure, you know, large language models would be very careful about that. And we also know that humans need to be in the loop of these things, to be able to promote collaboration and things like that.

Brett: So I think there’s a place for FP&A solutions to do this and large language models can form part of the equation in deploying an FP&A solution, but you still need that core engine to support it.

David: Absolutely. We’ve got many of our clients combining the two together. So they’re using Adaptive Planning for their core FP&A needs. But then for some of that analysis over the top, if it’s preparing for board packs and trying to get some of that language right, sometimes they do a cut and paste and they leverage their own AI engine just to help with some of the analysis and comparatives and so forth for their board packs.

Workday’s investment in AI functionality

[Watch at 16:50]

Brett: This is why it’s such an exciting space to be in, because we know, Workday, for example – how much investment is going into bringing AI to their Adaptive Planning solution and how it’s being integrated within that.

Brett: And we’ve already witnessed some of those developments – being able to ask a question in natural language and have it pull back, explain a variance or the top five variances within a P&L, for example, and then drill down into the detail.

Brett: So that’s what’s to come, and that’s exciting. But yeah, we’re about solving for the now, which is the fundamentals. And I think Adaptive Planning is certainly a great option for businesses to consider as part of that.