Forrester TEI Study Finds Workday Adaptive Planning Delivered 242% ROI

In this article we discuss:

• From Manual FP&A to Strategic Finance
• Bringing HR and Finance Into One Conversation
• Empowering Business Leaders With Self-Serve Insight
• Reducing IT Bottlenecks and Tool Sprawl
• Turning Efficiency Into Business Value
• The Bottom Line: Quantifying the Impact

Strategy rarely fails for lack of vision—it stalls in the friction of the planning cycle. Teams spend so much energy managing the grit in their own processes—siloed data, broken version control, and manual reconciliations—that they never move beyond the mechanics of the business to the actual mission.

To quantify what happened when planning shifts from manual and reactive to connected and intelligent, Workday Adaptive Planning commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study in February of 2026.

After interviewing five Adaptive Planning customers and modeling a composite $1 billion enterprise with 5,000 employees, Forrester found that eliminating friction and embedding decision intelligence into planning workflows created a measurable financial advantage.

From Manual FP&A to Strategic Finance

Before implementing Adaptive Planning, interviewed organizations described a familiar pattern: siloed spreadsheets, heavy IT dependencies, and more time spent gathering and reconciling data than adding value.

But when organizations centralized models and embedded AI capabilities—like predictive forecasting, anomaly detection, and real-time dashboards—productivity soared. For the composite organization based on interviewed customers, teams saw 35% efficiency gains by year three.

The highest-performing FP&A teams consistently liberate themselves from transactional reporting and focus on forward-looking advisory tasks, like long-term planning, scenario modeling, and business impact analysis.

Bringing HR and Finance Into One Conversation

In many organizations, people account for 75% to 80% of operating costs. But workforce planning and financial planning often live entirely separately.

The Forrester study found that by integrating workforce and financial planning in a unified platform, the composite organization improved HR productivity by 30% across three years.

Beyond these considerable efficiency gains, operating from a shared environment also eliminates version disputes and reconciliation delays between finance and HR teams.

When each discipline operates from the same fundamental model, the two can coordinate around a shared version of the truth that enables faster workforce decisions, improved auditability, and greater confidence in aligning headcount costs with the true needs of the business.

Empowering Business Leaders With Self-Serve Insight

Everybody plans. Beyond finance and HR, managers rely on accurate finance and workforce data to manage budgets, evaluate capacity, and adjust how and what work gets done.

In the composite organization for the Forrester study, 200 business managers used view-only access to Adaptive Planning to reduce the reliance on finance and HR for insights. They cut the time spent chasing data  —translating into over $1.2 million in value from a 50% productivity gain.

Self-service access to workforce and financial data insights means managers can make faster, more informed decisions, without mining spreadsheets.

Reducing IT Bottlenecks and Tool Sprawl

When finance and HR depend on IT for report creation, data integration and system maintenance, everything slows down.

By implementing Adaptive Planning, the composite organization in the Forrester study was able to reallocate two full-time IT employees to higher-value initiatives. In some cases, organizations were even able to retire legacy tools and eliminate thousands of planning spreadsheets.

When HR and finance can self-serve the reports and integrations they need to get work done, planning can move at the speed of the business instead of the service desk.

Turning Efficiency Into Business Value

The most significant benefit of the study came from optimized decision-making. With more time dedicated to analysis and advisory work, teams found opportunities to:

• Improve pricing strategies
• Retire redundant software licenses
• Reallocate investments to higher-margin business units
• Increase revenue through improved insight

Together, these opportunities amounted to approximately $2.7 million in value—shifting planning from a cost-center to a profit-driving activity.

The Bottom Line: Quantifying the Impact

Forrester’s composite organization realized significant value by streamlining their planning ecosystem:

• 242% 3-year return on investment (ROI)
• <6 months payback period
• $4.5M 3-year net present value (NPV)

The real value, however, lies in how that reclaimed time is used. One customer interviewed for the study, a head of commercial finance in the legal services industry, highlighted the direct impact on their bottom line:

“Last year, we had our biggest improvement in profit margin in six years. A lot of that is because we were able to spend our time actually looking under the skin of the number and asking, ‘Where are the teams that need performance enhancing, and what kind of rate increases can we offer to clients?’ It’s generating results.”

When planning becomes connected, autonomous, and intelligence-driven, strategic command follows.

Explore the full Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study and discover how these five teams turned planning into a growth engine. Read the study.