As legacy solution companies make plans to sunset their on-premise applications, the owners of enterprise performance management (EPM) systems face a tough decision: migrate to their vendor’s new cloud-based EPM solution or find a proven alternative.
Not surprisingly, legacy vendors are pressuring customers to upgrade to their respective cloud platforms. Problem is, this old-model-in-a-new-world approach is often a simple reimplementation of outdated software. What’s more, these reskinned legacy systems often lack the equivalent functionality of cloud-native applications.
Case in point: Jackson Family Wines, a family-owned collection of over 40 wineries, struggled to manage masses of data after a period of expansion. Its legacy system couldn’t keep up with the additional volume of data that came along with multiple brands, bar codes, and business units. Finally, the winemaker decided to go with a cloud-native solution.
The Smarter Option: Convert to a New Solution
More and more forward-thinking organizations are choosing to replace their outdated technology with the Workday Adaptive Planning platform. Our flexible solution is what separates Workday Adaptive Planning from its competitors.
Manage growing data volumes: With ever-increasing data growth, many finance teams struggle to transform the information available to them into valuable insights that aid in strategic business decisions. Modern planning solutions must support changing business conditions while remaining powerful enough to take on complex modeling and data requirements.
After implementing Workday Adaptive Planning, Jackson Family Wines was able to build a planning process that scaled with the needs and complexities of its growing business. In addition, the company gained the insights needed to plan ahead 10 years out, all while accurately and more efficiently managing financial planning processes across multiple business units.
Increase business agility: In today’s competitive environment, agility is a strategic imperative. The better organizations can anticipate and plan for change, the faster they can accelerate. For Jackson Family Wines, the ability to rapidly shift labor due to harvest and production cycles, while accounting for consumer demand, was key to success.
If your business is still using legacy EPM products, now is the time to prepare for the future with a modern cloud planning system.
Crucial to business agility is scenario planning, which helps decision-makers identify ranges of potential outcomes and impacts. This is particularly important during times of economic uncertainty. With Workday Adaptive Planning, financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams can quickly spin up what-if scenarios, build iterative models, and accurately report results. These capabilities enable organizations to quickly navigate change, forecast and budget using current data, and ultimately drive smarter decision-making.
Scenario planning is a critical component of continuous planning. With continuous planning, stakeholders companywide monitor goals, metrics, and milestones for existing priorities on a continuous, rolling basis. But they also seek to develop new strategic priorities simultaneously. This combination ensures a culture of self-evaluation, innovation, and adaptability.
Automate critical planning processes: Laborious forecast and budget processes using manual spreadsheets are error prone and a drain on productivity. Workday Adaptive Planning automates these vital finance processes, accelerating reporting cycles and ensuring budgeting and forecasting accuracy. Self-service reporting is critical for teams to access real-time data without roadblocks, and automated updates and security patches help to streamline user experience and increase adoption. All of these factors help free up time for finance teams to spend on high-value analysis and planning decision-making.
Trust the Acknowledged Leader in Cloud Planning
Migrating your legacy EPM solution to the cloud is a smart move. With the right technology foundation in place—and with finance being the shepherd of culture change—your organization becomes optimized for smarter, faster decision-making. In a business landscape where the only certainty is uncertainty and the only constant is change, that’s the defining feature of the competitive edge.
Finance leaders worldwide understand this, with more than 5,800 planning customers putting their trust in Workday Adaptive Planning as their enterprise planning software solution. Our purpose-built cloud-first EPM software is flexible, intuitive, and future ready.
If your business is still using legacy EPM products, now is the time to prepare for the future with a modern cloud planning system.
Talk with one of our experts today.
This blog was originally published on the Workday Blog.
