After years of relying on partners for providing customers with financial and workforce planning capabilities, Workday has taken the wraps off its homegrown Workday Planning product. Here are the key details from its announcement at the Workday Rising conference this week:
The world of financial and workforce planning today is disjointed, with data residing across multiple systems and silos of spreadsheets that require finance, HR, and business leaders to spend considerable time on manual calculations to ensure data integrity, rather than analysis and driving business outcomes.
In response to market and customer challenges, Workday is delivering a new approach to enterprise planning that enables customers to:
· Configure Planning to Business Needs: Customers can define their plan structure for financial or workforce planning by month, quarter, or year, and use the plan generator to create baseline plans using historical or real-time finance and HR data in the system.
· Collaborate Across the Business: Planning teams can use Workday’s collaborative worksheets, which bring the familiarity and functionality of a spreadsheet into Workday’s secure enterprise environment, to create models and scenarios leveraging live transactional data, and then partner with key stakeholders to iterate and finalize a budget, forecast, or headcount plan.
· Continuously Plan and Execute on Budgets: While executing on plans, organizations can leverage real-time financial and management reporting capabilities with built-in analytics and visualizations to drill-down to track progress and make adjustments to budgets and forecasts as business or market shifts occur.
Previously, Workday had formed partnerships with the likes of Anaplan and Tidemark for planning. The company has said it will honor those existing relationships, but clearly is now in a competitive stance with Workday Planning.
Workday Planning is based in part on spreadsheet technology acquired through the purchase of Gridcraft last year. Customers had been asking Workday to develop a planning solution, says Leighanne Levensaler, SVP of product: "What CFOs and directors of finance are telling is that they want to do continuous planning and engage many more people in the process."
Analysis: A Work In Progress
The introduction of Workday Planning is an important and natural next step for the vendor, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "For Workday customers who are focused exclusively on financial planning and budgeting and who do not already have these tools, Workday Planning is a compelling choice, as all the user profiles, data dimensions, cost centers, companies, customers and so on will be immediately accessible and ready for planning work without integration work," Henschen says. "It will mean the difference between spending hours or, at most, a couple of days on system setup and spending weeks or months on setup and data integration with a third-party product."
However, if companies have already implemented a mature budgeting and planning product or are looking for broad performance management suite, the dynamics of a product selection or replacement are different, Henschen adds. That's because when it comes to use cases, Workday Planning is currently focused only on financial and workforce planning. In contrast, "more mature third-party products tend to have extensive pre-built applications or starting-point IP for many other operational areas such as marketing, sales, supply chain and project budgeting and planning as well as finance and HR use cases," Henschen says.
While Workday says Planning is a general-purpose tool that will be used in many contexts, it's worth investigating planned use cases and the supporting content third-party vendors can provide, Henschen adds.
Integration is also a limiting factor at the present time for Workday Planning, as it's currently confined to CSV and spreadsheet-ingest integration with dedicated connectors still in the vision stage. Third-party vendors such as Adaptive Insights, Anaplan and Host Analytics have mature native integration capabilities as well as partnerships with broadly capable integration vendors such as Informatica and SnapLogic, Henschen notes.
The bottom line? Workday will undoubtedly add to its list of data-integration options and to the list of planning applications, but at this early stage its best play is rapid deployment for financial planning and budgeting against Workday data.
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