Wine and Chocolate: An Adaptive Planning Love Story

Dan Brooks, senior director of Sales at Kainos, a six-time Global Workday Adaptive Planning solution partner of the year, sat down with two seasoned FP&A professionals to discuss how Workday Adaptive Planning has transformed FP&A at leading wine companies and a San Francisco Bay Area chocolatier. 

Eric Waterman is a wine industry FP&A professional and has worked at leading wine companies including Treasury Wine Estates, Vintage Wine Estates, and Constellation Brands. Rochelle Lu is the head of FP&A at a 100+ year old chocolate company based in the United States consisting of manufacturing, retail shops, and an online eCommerce platform.  

The following are some key takeaways from their discussion. View the interview in its entirety here. 

What were the organizational and business priorities that prompted you to look for a solution to improve budgeting, planning, modeling? 

Rochelle: We needed a good budgeting and forecasting tool to help with our formulation of our business strategy. Of course, the ultimate goal is to use [Adaptive Planning] for revenue enhancement and also cost optimization.  

Eric: First and foremost it was about the ability to get data quickly - to get it accurately because the P&L [statements] and other financial reports were taking two days to actually produce and there were still errors in them. The second component from an objective was just how do you take the tool to do long-range planning? The organization had never had any type of long-range strategic plan. We are able to pull in multiple years of history into Adaptive [Planning], use that from a predictive standpoint, and then make any top line adjustments on top of that.  

Using Adaptive Planning, what were some of the opportunities for the finance team to be more efficient and effective? 

Rochelle: We took the approach to empower our business partners to do budgeting and forecasting in Adaptive Planning directly. The nice part about Adaptive Planning is that it's very user-friendly and very easy to learn. Some of [our users] are already becoming experts and trying to build their own little model or little dashboard on their own. 

Eric: The greatest benefit I saw was with the sales team because there were a lot of ad hoc requests and going back to the amount of time the team was spending working on just pulling data. They wanted to see performance at a state level or brand level versus budget or prior year; they couldn't do that really on their own. What Adaptive Planning did is have a whole section on sales reporting that was built so those guys could go self-service on their own every day. They could take a look at their performance and the senior vice president could look at it, hold people accountable, and drill all the way down to the sales rep level. And so that was the line of sight that they didn't have before and it was definitely a game- changer and it definitely freed up a lot of time on the finance team because they were no longer having to handle those requests.  

How is management using the insights that you now have with Workday Adaptive Planning?  

Eric: It’s speed of getting the data right and being much more reactive to what you're seeing because in the past, it was taking weeks to get the data out and published. Now you can get the data out in seconds and people can read it, digest it, and make decisions on it much quicker. And so you're being much more of an offensive position for the senior leadership than what they were before.  

Rochelle: We create a lot of different reports and cater for different levels of review. We create an analysis report for budget owners and performance metrics report for, for example, the sales team. We also create a comprehensive P&L view for our senior management team. And, we also have a long-range view based on those reports so they can actually have a forward-looking [view] if we have different assumptions or scenarios that what would look like.  

What would you say that your greatest success is with the implementation of Adaptive Planning? 

Rochelle: I would say now it becomes the primary platform for our business users to look at their financial performance of the individual business areas. 

Eric: I think from my side it's probably a matter of trust. In the past when we were doing things in Excel, you need to have that trust from the finance team. And so now you have senior leadership knowing that they can get the data, they can get it quick, and that they can trust that there's one source of truth and that it's hundred percent accurate…there are never any questions about the accuracy of the data.  

To watch the entire interview and gain more valuable insights, watch the on-demand webinar here.