Workday Adaptive Planning Blog - Where People Who Plan Come to Learn

As just about any finance professional knows, there’s a huge need for FP&A teams to become more strategic partners to the business. That’s where analytics enter the picture. Robust analytic capabilities increase insight into business performance, allowing FP&A teams to make better decisions—which helps earn strategic partner status. And Covid makes improved decision making more critical than ever.

How FP&A teams can own & lead analytics in 5 steps

August 14, 2020

As just about any finance professional knows, there’s a huge need for FP&A teams to become more strategic partners to the business. That’s where analytics enter the picture. Robust analytic capabilities increase insight into business performance, allowing FP&A teams to make better decisions—which helps earn strategic partner status. And, as… Read More

As the business world shifts toward recovery and the concept of a new normal, agility is fast-becoming priority number one for finance teams. Here, we take a closer look at four elements of finance agility and how businesses should be thinking about them today.

The 4 elements of finance agility–and why they are important

Steve Dunne

August 11, 2020

There’s a lot of attention being paid to the concept of agility right now. Given the world we’re living in, that’s hardly surprising. Against a backdrop of uncertainty, agile businesses have the ability to rapidly adjust their people and processes to create more value and react quickly to changing conditions.… Read More

When the world moved at a more predictable velocity, static planning was usually sufficient. But as the digital age emerged, companies found they needed nimble, data-driven financial modeling powered by cross-departmental collaboration and encompassing a panoramic view of the business—one where planning happened not just within finance but throughout the enterprise. This is active planning. It’s continuous, comprehensive, and collaborative.

Want to achieve business agility? Identify your critical KPIs.

Bob Hansen

August 5, 2020

Now more than ever, companies that are unable to adapt or pivot easily to adjust to changing market conditions don’t just risk falling behind. They risk their very future. But business agility isn’t something you can implement overnight. It takes a modern, multifaceted planning environment—one that isn’t weighed down by… Read More

3 words for a COVID-19 world: ‘Flexible budget variance’

Bob Hansen

August 3, 2020

With the COVID-19 pandemic shredding budget forecasts and presenting FP&A professionals with actuals that are nowhere close to original expectations, now is the perfect time to get acquainted with a certain term: “Flexible budget variance.” See this webinar on-demand: “Reforecasting in Uncertain Times” Sure, flexible budget variance might sound wonky.… Read More

In today’s disruptive world, a startup can be up and running and profitable in three months and disrupt its competitors. Consider Uber and Airbnb as examples. If your company takes nearly as long to develop an annual budget, it will be extremely difficult to fight off the upstarts or keep up with your established competitors.

How to augment your annual plan with continuous budgeting & forecasting

Workday Adaptive Planning

July 30, 2020

Traditional budgeting is simply too slow and too rigid to keep up with today’s rapidly changing market conditions. Covid-19 has created great volatility, complexity, and uncertainty in the future. Gone are the days when budgets could be one-and-done—tied to a fixed point in time and too inflexible to adjust to… Read More

Integrating a rolling forecast rather than relying on a static annual budget allows businesses to increase their agility and more accurately define their paths forward

Ready to start growing again? Start with rolling forecasts.

Gary Cokins

July 28, 2020

If 2020 has proven anything, it’s that even the most change-averse among us have no choice but to think about our businesses in new ways. Revenue streams have been disrupted, workforces have gone remote, and conditions are changing almost daily. In these emerging moments of recovery, as we begin to… Read More

In mid-June, a PwC survey of 330 U.S. finance leaders found that one-third of US CFOs now expect it will take more than six months to get there. Two months earlier, just 2% of CFOs anticipated recovery would take that long. Finance leaders are in a critical position to help assess the options and impacts associated with returning to work, including how the business can grow and react differently in the future.

Return-to-work checklist: Key steps to restart your organization successfully

Bob Hansen

July 21, 2020

Work may never be the same again. Or at least it will be some time before we return to “business as usual.” In mid-June, a PwC survey of 330 U.S. finance leaders found that one-third of US CFOs now expect it will take more than six months to get there.… Read More

Finance leaders have become strategic partners by reaching across their organizations to learn about business pain points, including clinical perspectives, human resource constraints, and supply chain challenges. Especially in times of crisis and uncertainty, it’s become increasingly important for the business side and the clinical side of healthcare to collaborate more closely and share insights. For example, looking to balance cost, quality, and outcomes, business leaders are using data to determine if high-cost equipment leads to better patient outcomes. With the CFO leading the way, arming the clinical teams with this type of information will help drive data-driven decisions about healthcare expenditures. This data sharing and increased collaboration will help teams work better together and plan for the unexpected.

Continuous planning and the role of the CFO

Keith Lohkamp

July 16, 2020

In the increasingly complex healthcare landscape, finance leaders must balance short term imperatives and longer term business objectives simultaneously. Having business insight, the ability to plan continuously, and empower decision makers at every level of the organization with data and insights is key to building resilient organizations. The role of… Read More

Few could possibly have predicted how this event could have sent recently minted plans and forecasts for 2020 into trash bins everywhere. But even before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, CFOs and other execs were keenly aware that business conditions were unpredictable. They were equally aware of the hurdles keeping them from the adaptability and agility needed to outmaneuver and pivot around unforeseen obstacles. The same 75% of survey respondents who said their planning processes left them vulnerable also reported that outdated legacy planning systems, siloed planning processes with limited collaboration, and a lack of relevant workforce skills were keeping them from embracing the one thing their business needed to weather the storms of disruption: agility.

To recover from economic shocks, are CFOs envisioning enough scenarios?

Bob Hansen

July 14, 2020

Three out of four finance executives recently acknowledged that the planning processes their companies have in place do not equip them to respond quickly to major economic and geopolitical disruption. Published in November of last year, the survey results could hardly have been more timely. Just a few weeks later,… Read More

Agility is a buzzword for a reason. CFOs hoping to build confidence and credibility in their numbers can no longer rely on static budget tools to get the job done. In a world with increased regulatory volatility, complexity, uncertainty, supply chain mobility, labor market changes, and technological evolution, a CFO must be agile, or generate irrelevant reports and budgets that no one reads or believes in.

3 driver-based budgeting tips for CFOs when change is imminent

Gary Cokins

July 9, 2020

Consider these tasks and the problems related to them: budgeting amid great uncertainty about the future (like today during COVID-19); inputting departmental budgets on multiple Excel worksheets; manually reconciling variances and correcting errors; and dealing with broken formulas, misinformation, and inaccuracies. The life of a finance team during budget season… Read More