Adaptive Planning in Business: Charting the Future in Real Time

Companies everywhere face the same dilemma: They have to plan for the future, but it constantly changes. As a result, they’re left continually revising their plans as the business environment evolves.

But it’s hard to plan nimbly or adjust quickly when organisation-wide data is often hard to access—let alone to leverage for business insights. That’s why forward-looking companies are toppling silos and, in their place, building collaborative processes. Traditional planning practices are making way for adaptive planning.

With adaptive planning, stakeholders company-wide can access the same real-time, accurate data. They collaboratively create plans that can easily and quickly adapt to changes.

Adaptive planning also enables deeper insights so decision-makers can make more timely and effective decisions. All of which help enterprises stay ahead in today’s fast-paced business world.

Read on to learn how future-focused organisations can tap the full potential of adaptive business planning.

What Is Adaptive Planning?

Today’s companies must be able to anticipate and respond to major pendulum swings in the business environment. When faced with a disruptive event such as a supply chain bottleneck, companies must adjust, often at a moment’s notice, by altering their forecasts for revenue, demand, or staffing.

Adaptive planning enables businesses to be nimble. By empowering enterprise-wide financial planning and reporting, companies can use flexible modelling and scenario planning to evolve as quickly as business conditions change. This collaborative, data-driven approach also permits finance to plan continuously—not just annually or quarterly.

Traditional planning, on the other hand, relies on dated legacy systems that disperse data across multiple disparate functions and massive spreadsheets. And it blocks companies from keeping up with the rapid pace of change.  

These systems silo information, resulting in incomplete and inconsistent views of the company and data that is inaccessible, inaccurate, and difficult to visualise. No surprise that static and disconnected data lead to static and disconnected plans. 51% of organisations say disconnected systems are the biggest roadblock to enterprise-wide planning, a global Deloitte survey found.

With adaptive planning software and processes, planners across the organisation can access the same up-to-date, accurate data on the same planning platform. They can explore and test countless what-if scenarios. And they can assess opportunities and gauge their potential impact on the business.

Is Adaptive Planning an EPM?

When people think of financial and operational software, they think first of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. An ERP, such as Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, is an integrated business system suite that includes finance management, procurement, and human capital management (HCM).

But many ERPs, even when they’re in the cloud, still involve fragmented technologies and architectures that result in data silos and disparate point solutions.

Some companies have lifted and shifted their ERP systems to the cloud, but this simply perpetuates the limitations of ERPs.

Meanwhile, an enterprise performance management (EPM) system, such as Workday Adaptive Planning, leverages data from ERPs and moves beyond their limitations. An EPM doesn’t just monitor business performance but aims to improve it.

An adaptive planning EPM provides a complete picture of the business—with finance, HR, and operational data all living in one unified data core. With AI embedded in that core, an adaptive planning EPM enables deeper and broader analyses of the information from the ERP and other business systems.

As a result, organisations gain a fuller understanding of their performance, so they can plan better, smarter, and quicker. 

Is Adaptive Planning the Same as Adaptive Insights?

Workday Adaptive Planning has undergone a few name changes over the years. In 2003, the software solution began as an alternative to spreadsheet-based planning and on-premises solutions. In 2014, it was renamed Adaptive Insights. In 2020, two years after Workday acquired it, the solution was rebranded as Workday Adaptive Planning.

While the name has changed, the adaptive planning technology has continued. Workday has continually evolved the tools to meet customers’ needs.

Who Uses Adaptive Planning?

Workday Adaptive Planning is a powerful financial planning tool that facilitates quick and easy planning and analysis with accurate budgets and visually stunning reports. But a thriving planning environment supports business agility for all users and roles, not only those in finance.

Adaptive Planning empowers planners from all functions to create their plans and link them to the overall corporate plan overseen by finance. Workforce, sales, operations, and finance teams share planning insights in one unified system—yielding faster, stronger decisions.

With Adaptive Planning, you can build reports by business function and by business role, whether the role is the CEO, CFO, CHRO, financial analyst, HR team member, or any other user. HR leaders, for instance, can embrace Adaptive Planning to identify the changing skills needed in an increasingly competitive talent marketplace.  

Adaptive Planning also serves various industries beyond finance—from manufacturing to professional services, healthcare education, and many more. 

Examples of Adaptive Planning

From slashing the time it takes to budget and plan to boost cross-functional planning, companies of all stripes are using Workday Adaptive Planning to forecast faster and improve insights. Here is how two customers have benefited most. 

Scout24: Planning That Takes Weeks, Not Months

Scout24, which operates Germany’s leading real estate platform, once had a complex planning and forecasting system. Up to 90 people across several business units developed plans based on data in their separate spreadsheets. The finance team then had to check all that data before they could create their reports.  

After replacing its spreadsheets system with Workday Adaptive Planning, Scout24 forecasts monthly directly in the planning platform. The company requires almost no preparation for the budgeting process because the data is already available and continually updated in Adaptive Planning.

In the past, Scout24’s planning process took four months. “With Workday Adaptive Planning, we have reduced our preparation time by three weeks to almost zero and the overall planning process down to two to three weeks,” says Philipp Dobberow, Scout24’s controlling, reporting, and procurement director.

Doctolib: From Data Crunching to Collaborative Analysing

A France-based healthcare technology company, Doctolib provides healthcare professionals with e-health services—from online booking solutions to medical software—that improve their organisations’ efficiency and patients’ experience. As the company grew, its conventional, spreadsheet-based accounting and reporting processes no longer sufficed. Doctolib needed a far more resilient and agile planning platform.

Doctolib adopted Workday Adaptive Planning and integrated it with Workday HCM. Now, Doctolib has a single planning platform with consistent and accurate data flows and workflows. Doctolib’s planners have access to the same data simultaneously, so they can collaborate effectively across the business, share assumptions easily and in real time, and develop budgets and forecasts much more quickly.

“Everyone is now working collaboratively to develop forecasts, and the finance team is no longer weighed down by lots of data crunching,” says Denis Kavaliou, data governance and EPM manager.

Explore the Advantages of Workday Adaptive Planning

When organisations can anticipate change continually and operationalise a coordinated response quickly, they can stay ahead of the competition—even amid major disruption.

As a cloud-native modern planning platform, Workday Adaptive Planning integrates seamlessly with third-party solutions such as ERP, HCM, customer relationship management (CRM), or other systems of record—so planners always access a single source of truth.  

Workday Adaptive Planning enables deeper, actionable insights through self-service reporting and analysis—so planners don’t have to rely on IT for support. And Workday provides consumer-friendly dashboards that make it easy for planners to visualise and interact with data.

With the real-time insights provided by Workday Adaptive Planning, finance can build more flexible and accurate plans in collaboration with HR, sales, and other business partners. Planners can then identify variances and uncover the causes. They can quickly assess the potential impact of any decision and adjust their plans accordingly. And they can make strategic decisions that seize opportunities and mitigate risks.

For instance, finance might spot a trending revenue gap. In Workday Adaptive Planning, they can consider the impacts of ways to address those gaps, such as hiring more salespeople in a certain region.  

By tapping into external data sources and leveraging machine learning, Adaptive Planning adds intelligence to forecasts—helping to determine patterns, predict outcomes, and pivot nimbly from analysis to action.