Workday, provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, unveiled Workday Planning, a new planning, budgeting and forecasting application to be used with Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management to unify real-time finance and HR data with analytics and enterprise planning.
Workday Planning enables employees to create, collaborate, and act on budgets and forecasts in the unified system that runs on Workday’s in-memory technology to optimize performance.
“It’s the first system that unifies transactions, financial and human capital management to support continuous planning in a highly collaborative fashion,” said Leighanne Levensaler, Workday’s senior vice president of product. That planning is contextualized in a unified security and data model delivered in Workday’s cloud, she explained.
Workday Planning also includes an import process so the system can link with existing spreadsheets and integrate them into Workday’s collaborative worksheets, which combine the familiarity of a spreadsheet with Workday’s unique interactive grid experience. With this data, users can then create and manage multiple forecasts and budget scenarios.
The application’s continuous planning functionality makes it ideal for professionals across an enterprise organization, especially those in finance, HR, planning and operations.
Both the market and Workday customers demanded a solution to support this kind of real-time planning, according to Levensaler.
“We live in a dynamic business climate right now,” she explained, “where things are changing every day and we’re looking for more of a continuous planning capability. Customers in Workday now, through the power of budgetary execution, [are saying] let’s not do that in a check-the-box fashion, but a more contemporary way, continuous and collaborative, so the companies can be agile.”
Workday Planning’s features include:
- A budget generator where customers can combine historical actuals and budget data with modeling assumptions to automatically generate a baseline budget without integrating with third-party systems.
- Collaborative planning features so teams can create models and scenarios to be shared and edited with operational managers.
- Workday’s built-in analytics and reporting tools, which enables customers to adjust plans and forecasts, and continuously manage the budget while measuring it against organizational performance.
“In many cases, [for many companies] the planning exercise is not in a continuum fashion,” Levensaler said. “When you make planning part of the posture of the company, there’s more power in the planning process.”
Workday Planning, to be leveraged within the Workday suite of finance and HCM applications, will be generally available to customers in 2016.
