With dozens of Workday Adaptive Planning Implementations under our belt, we have learned a number of different tips and tricks that make the planning process even easier within Adaptive. In our webinar, we discussed a number of these tips and tricks in the context of a personnel model. For many businesses, employee expenses make up the largest percentage of a company’s expenditure, and many of the strategies used here can be applied to various other models. Below we highlight the tips and tricks covered in the webinar as well as a few additional suggestions to help take your planning to the next level.
We also invite you to watch a recording of the webinar found HERE.
Times in parentheses below refer to times within the recording.
Using Unicode Characters
One of the easiest ways to improve your Adaptive Planning instance is to keep it organized. This allows users to quickly identify what it is they are looking at and where they are located in the system. Although that may be obvious, there are a number of users that will become overwhelmed by the system, especially as it evolves over time. One form of staying organized is the use of unicode characters to provide a visual guide. Unicode characters can be added to the names of accounts and dimensions as well as brought in via integration as shown in our Gsheet integration demo during the webinar (12:15). With the help of these identifiers, data can be easily followed from the source system all the way through to reporting. Learn more about unicode characters on our blog HERE.
Utilizing All Forms of Integration
Adaptive is widely known for its flexibility of integration. From native Netsuite connections to custom cloud and JDBC builds, it is rare that we find a source system that we cannot integrate with, and while those connections are extremely helpful, people often forget about Excel integrations. Excel integrations are helpful because there are times when new data is needed in the system. This data may come from a new data source or may be in the incorrect format for adaptive to identify and automap. Using an Excel integration will allow you to quickly download a report to Excel and upload that report to Adaptive. Once the data is uploaded, we are able to process the data in the staging area before pushing it into the model in a more recognizable form (7:50).
Utilizing Dashboards
Dashboards are one of the most underutilized features within Adaptive. This often occurs as similar insights can be found using reports, however, dashboards allow you to consolidate the information in one place and give extreme flexibility when building visuals (0:18). Many of our clients use dashboards in order to consolidate the data entry and its analysis into one place. This is done by adding the sheet as well as a web report to the same dashboard, allowing for real-time analysis of inputs and their effect on the model. Additionally, dashboards can be used to help gain a snapshot of personnel and headcount data, as well as customer information by way of integrations with CRMs.
Office Connect
Office Connect is a valuable resource for all users. But there are a number of features that still aren’t in every users’ toolbox. The first feature we want to highlight is the concept of relative time. Relative time allows the user to move the elements in the workbook forward or back in time in order to pull from the correct timespan. This removes the need to recreate the same reports over and over again in order to bring in the next quarter of data (17:00). Another useful feature is the expand function. This allows users to bring in parent accounts and other elements. After bringing in the various parents, the report can be expanded all the way down to the leaf level with the click of a button, greatly reducing the time needed to build one of these reports.
Additional Adaptive Tips and Tricks
Looking for more best practices? Visit our Adaptive Corner to see what other helpful tricks you can incorporate into your Adaptive Planning instance. Additionally, reach out to us if there are other topics you’d like us to cover or questions we can answer.