Financial Tech Report Distribution Case Study

While Workday Adaptive Planning served as a valuable central repository for financial data and insights, getting that information in front of the managers and executives who needed it was difficult. The concept of self-service reporting within the Adaptive website was not working for this busy and easily distracted audience. They needed something that would integrate seamlessly with Slack and email, where they spent most of their time. 

Scalability - This led to the FP&A team receiving requests to create custom reports for each recipient in Excel spreadsheets. Since many of these reports needed to be recreated weekly or monthly, this model was inherently unscalable and was an inefficient use of highly skilled analysts’ time.

Limits of Self-Service Reporting - The reporting paradigm for Workday Adaptive Planning is based on dashboards and reports that are accessed securely through a web browser. To be effective, users need to understand how to use the tool, and to know how to sift through the data to get to the information they need. While this worked very well for analysts and some middle managers, executives higher up on the corporate ladder did not have the time to acquire the necessary dexterity. Even when they were willing to learn, as occasional users they needed constant refreshers which also put a strain on FP&A resources.

Slack and Email - Most company interactions occur via Slack and email. The client felt that their goal of delivering accurate, timely and relevant information to decision-makers would be most effective using these two channels. The problem was that the data lived in Workday Adaptive Planning, and there was no native way to present that data in Slack or email short of providing a link to the Adaptive website.