7 Benefits of Transitioning to Workday Adaptive Planning
Across all industries, markets and business conditions remain in a heightened state of uncertainty. Global economic growth is expected to slow to 2.3% this year, the UN’s Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is the highest in a century, and the “fear index”—a sign of investor hesitancy—has reached its third highest year on record.
For enterprises looking to remain profitable and drive strategic growth, fixed, long-term roadmaps are no longer feasible. Instead, companies are switching to enterprise resource planning, a responsive approach that emphasizes the real-time, integrated management of core business functions.
But regularly reviewing and adjusting plans based on new information and market feedback is difficult to do manually—and if you want predictive analysis, it’s almost impossible. As such, you may be looking at platforms like Workday Adaptive Planning to aid your decision-making.
Why Enterprise Resource Planning Requires Strategic Technology Solutions
Enterprise resource planning is a broad umbrella term that can include a number of functions, each of which on their own would be difficult to manage manually:
- Continuous Feedback — Regularly reviewing and adjusting plans based on new information, feedback, or changes in the environment. For enterprise businesses, this can mean processing millions of datapoints (or more) on a regular basis.
- Scenario Planning — Modeling potential future outcomes to prepare for all future scenarios is only robust when supported by predictive models.
- Short-Term Goals and Milestones—Managing a series of short-term goals and tracking progress across an enterprise is a very involved project management ask, especially when these are constantly in flux as business needs change.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration — When every team has their own source of truth or planning solution, it’s difficult to communicate in a way that enables real collaboration.
Trying to perform all of these functions manually can expose your enterprise to serious risk and have drastic negative consequences.
Inefficiencies and Data Errors
If you use spreadsheets for planning, budgeting, and forecasting, this can cause major inefficiencies and errors within the organization. What’s more, time spent entering and reconciling data across multiple systems—CRM, HRC, SCM—is time that could be better spent on more valuable revenue-generating activities.
Limited Cross-Functional Collaboration
When teams operate with their own siloed processes and platforms, cross-functional collaboration is difficult to achieve. One team could make a strategic pivot that negatively impacts another, and the result is worse than if you’d just stuck to the original plan in the first place.
Security Risks
Disparate systems and a combination of online/offline management, when security practices are insufficient, pose serious risks for your organization. Unauthorized data access, modification, or cyberattacks can be disastrous, with the average cost of a data breach sitting at around $5 million.
Reduced Scalability
Legacy enterprise software is not only rigid and inflexible, but it also can’t handle the scale that most enterprises need in 2025. Switching from on-prem to cloud or cloud native platforms, for example, gives you an ability to scale that most people don’t have.
Missed Opportunities
When your adaptive planning processes are slow and inefficient, you miss out on opportunities to make timely decisions. What’s more, limited data modeling or scenario planning can prevent you from discovering certain courses of action you may not have otherwise considered. This seriously reduces the effectiveness of your planning.
7 Benefits of Transitioning to Workday Adaptive Planning
Workday Adaptive Planning is a leading enterprise technology platform which offers features that are among the best in the market:
- Unified planning environment for financial, workforce, and operational data
- AI-driven forecasting that provides real-time insights into rapidly changing business conditions
- Elastic Hypercube technology that dynamically scales computing power and memory to handle complex, multidimensional models and large data sets
- Built-in scenario planning models based on common business use cases
- Customizable dashboards and reporting
- Seamless integrations with core business systems, including ERP, HCM, CRM, and more to ensure real-time data sharing across the organization
Here are seven of the core advantages that come from using this platform.
1. Enhanced Agility and Flexibility
Workday’s unified planning environment, suite of AI tools, and Hypercube technology all enable a more comprehensive, flexible approach to data modeling. This enables users to simulate different business outcomes in real time, enabling them to more quickly course-correct in response to shifting market conditions.
2. Real-Time, Integrated Data
Because Workday Adaptive Planning integrates seamlessly with all your core business systems, data silos are a thing of the past. A single source of truth for strategy development and analysis enables stronger cross-functional collaboration, and more inputs enable you to be more responsive to market changes.
3. Mitigated Risks
A core requirement of modern enterprise resource planning is scenario planning, and Workday has this in spades. The platform’s built-in “what-if” scenarios and test models based on your data enable you to anticipate risks and opportunities quickly and efficiently. Additionally, built-in dashboards provide clear visual insight into business drivers and performance metrics.
4. AI-Powered Decision-Making
Workday Adaptive Planning is fitted with Workday Illuminate, a next-gen AI tool that helps organizations make smarter decisions faster. This software automatically provides recommendations, based on intelligent predictions of what’s ahead, and eliminates mundane tasks from your plate.
5. Automated Workflows and Orchestrations
Workday Adaptive Planning includes automated workflows that can increase efficiency, reduce errors, and accelerate response to real-time data and insights. Users can build workflows that standardize processes (e.g. onboarding, performance management, expense approvals), route tasks to other users, trigger automated notifications, and integrate with your other systems.
Workday’s automated workflows are a key feature because not only do they enable you to plan more effectively (e.g. by alerting you to real-time changes in market conditions), but they help you take instant action on those changes.
6. Scalability
Workday Adaptive Planning is built to support growth and complexity with no accompanying risk of performance. Not only can it scale to handle large volumes of data and high performance demands, but you can implement it throughout the organization—across departments and stakeholders—to ensure teamwork and transparency as your goals continually shift.
7. Smooth Collaboration
With a unified platform, your team operates from a single source of truth—updated in real time. Adaptive Planning further empowers users to collaborate with interactive dashboards, process guidance, and self-service reports.
Biggest Mistakes When Transitioning to Workday Adaptive Planning
Transitioning to Workday Adaptive Planning can deliver significant benefits, but organizations often encounter critical pitfalls that undermine success. The most common mistakes include:
- No strategic change management, which hurts user adoption rates
- Lack of clear objectives and alignment across departments, teams, and functions
- Inadequate training, leaving users unprepared and inefficient when using the software
- Poor data integration strategy, which hurts both the quality of your data, AI-generated plans, and Workday’s effectiveness
- Lack of human oversight for automations and AI-powered decisions
- Limited security protocols around data handling, which can lead to breaches and reputational issues
- Inadequate testing and QA checks before, during, and after implementation
All of these problems are symptoms of a bigger issue: Companies buy the software, thinking that “just tech” is going to fix their problem. But in reality, if you don’t change the people and processes that operate that technology, your old problems will just be added onto the new system.
At TEKLEIGH, our “never just tech” approach prioritizes people and process optimization throughout your Workday Adaptive Planning journey. Our end-to-end services start with the development of a phased roadmap that ensures timely milestones and effective risk mitigation. As implementation begins, we support your adoption with comprehensive business process optimization, data management, and ongoing training, testing, and support.
As a trusted Workday Partner, we’re prepared to guide your journey to streamlined success—so you can achieve a smooth transition and continually maximize ROI.
Considering a transition to an enterprise performance management system? Reach out to TEKLEIGH to reap the full benefits of Workday Adaptive Planning.
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