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Adaptive Insights (a Workday company), business planning and management
Company description: Founded in 2003, Adaptive Insights, a Workday company, is powering a new generation of business planning. Driving business agility in a fast-moving world, Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud helps people in companies to collaborate, gain insights and make smarter decisions, faster. It offers powerful modeling for any size organization, yet is so easy for everybody who plans.
Whether they know it or not, many organizations stand at a cliff edge. In today’s fast-paced business climate, companies need to be able to move quickly. But decision making is stalled by static planning, typically handled with spreadsheets or legacy on-premise solutions. A modern cloud-based planning process that is continuous, comprehensive and collaborative offers a path forward for companies in the age of urgency. By enabling organizations of all sizes to respond to changing business conditions with confidence and agility, Adaptive Insights transforms business planning into a strategic and competitive advantage.
Main Markets: Health care, life sciences, non-profits, software and technology
Headquarters: 2400 Geng Road, Palo Alto, Calif.
CEO: Tom Bogan
International Operations: UK, Europe, Middle East and Africa (London office); Australia and New Zealand (Sydney office); Japan (Tokyo office); Austin, TX; Boston; Chicago; Denver; Orlando, FL; San Francisco; Toronto, Canada; Brisbane, Australia; Prune, India
Products and Services
Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud delivers a comprehensive set of cloud-based software solutions supported by a powerful, in-memory technology platform for functional and company-wide business planning and built-in analytics at very large scale. Capable of handling complex multidimensional models with millions of trillions (1018) of cells, rapid scenario planning, analytics and reporting, Business Planning Cloud includes purpose-built domain intelligence to make it easier and faster for users to build functional models rather than always having to start from scratch. In addition to purpose-built solutions for finance, workforce, and sales, customers can model virtually any operational use, such as marketing demand generation and project-based planning.
Adaptive OfficeConnect works with Business Planning Cloud to provide full connectivity across Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint) for financial reports, board books and management presentations. With total control over formatting and the power to refresh data in a single click, users are able to reduce the financial reporting process from days to minutes.
Key Features
Business Planning Cloud enables the entire business planning process. The company has embedded reporting and analytics so users can plan the business, monitor and analyze performance, test scenarios to course correct to achieve their goals and report results to internal and external stakeholders.
The patent-pending Elastic Hypercube Technology supercharges the Business Planning Cloud platform with the power, scalability and performance companies of all sizes need to model the complexities of their business and to report on and analyze results––without compromising ease of use.
Additional key features in Business Planning Cloud are scalable modeling, scenario planning, variance analysis, ad hoc analysis, reporting, financial and operational KPIs and dashboards.
Insight and Analysis
Review from a professional on IT Central Station: How has it helped my organization? “Our organization is able to use Adaptive to complete a major majority of our monthly management and quarterly Board reports. By refreshing reports and pages automatically, it creates the monthly report package with little to no manual staff work. This process was very manual with our old system. Adaptive gives our users the flexibility to budget at either the Natural Account or line item level.”
What needs improvement? “Being able to drill down when using OfficeConnect.”
Overall comment from a professional on Gartner Peer Reviews (March 2019): “It has been easy to work with the company. They are very open to customer suggestions, and while they cannot always deliver on every request, it is clear that they view feedback seriously and value it. The Adaptive Planning product is very flexible and we are able to self-manage it and adapt the configuration to address changing requirements.”
What do you like most about the product or service? “Flexibility. We use the product to manage operating budgets for our facility management services provided to corporate customers. Every corporate customer has unique requirements, and being able to use Adaptive successfully to handle these different clients is a real benefit.”
What do you dislike most about the product or service? “There are some parts of the user interface that are tedious to work with, such as re-ordering accounts, collapsing/expanding the display of accounts, limitations on reports due to reaching maximum capacity of reporting elements, and other UI annoyances.”
What piece of advice would you give other prospective customers? “To get the highest value, plan to have a resource assigned who will become the subject matter expert, be an advocate for the product, and take responsibility to partner with Adaptive Insights and help users to acquire expertise.”
Review from a professional on G2 Crowd: “Contrary to other reviews, I find reporting and dashboards easy to use within the system once you’ve built a few. Being able to run different scenarios for outer year forecasts has been a huge benefit for our team. Any errors in the model are relatively easy to track down on your own, and the support team has been a huge asset to us throughout our time using Adaptive.”
What do you dislike? “The entire user interface is really clunky, and could use a lot of investment. We have received a good amount of negative feedback on user experience from budget owners, but with time they get used to it. Data privacy rules within the system are overly rigid.”
eWEEK aggregate score from various reviewers: 4.6/5.0
List of current customers: American Family Insurance, Harry’s, Jackson Family Wines, Kindred at Home, Legendary Entertainment, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, PF Chang’s, Seattle Sounders
Other key players in this market: Anaplan, Host Analytics, Oracle
Delivery: SaaS, cloud
Pricing: Pricing is on a per-user basis.