Spinal Elements Finds the Cure for FP&A Inefficiencies with Workday Adaptive Planning
Spinal Elements Finds the Cure for FP&A Inefficiencies with Workday Adaptive Planning
Dan Brooks, senior director of Sales at Kainos, a six-time Global Workday Adaptive Planning solution partner of the year, recently sat down with Caroline Lepiane, director of FP&A at Spinal Elements, a San Diego-based medical device and life sciences firm, to discuss how Workday Adaptive Planning has transformed Spinal Elements’ approach to FP&A. The following are some key takeaways from their discussion.
View the interview in its entirety here.
Spinal Elements’ Pain Points
Spinal Elements needed a more efficient, reliable FP&A solution. According to Lepiane, there were two main pain factors that propelled the organization to adopt a new tool.
As is often the case, the first pain point was caused by the company’s own success. When the company was small, it was possible to handle vast quantities of FP&A data using basic Excel models that were located and maintained within each department. As the company grew, more and more models were needed to handle the increased volume of data. The process of collecting and aggregating that data became exponentially more difficult and time-consuming.
The second pain point was that Excel proved to be increasingly unreliable as the volume of data it was expected to handle grew and grew. As Lepiane described it, “With Excel, we were never very stable. Links broke all the time. We used to joke around that we had a cash forecast that was held together with nothing more than chicken wire.”
How Workday Adaptive Planning Has Benefitted the FP&A Team at Spinal Elements
Almost as soon as the rollout of Workday Adaptive Planning was complete at Spinal Elements, the following key benefits became evident to Lepiane and her team:
- Time Savings: Because data is aggregated and updated from a centralized location, it is no longer necessary to track down the latest financial data from each department within the company and make sure that their financial models contain the latest data and are free of broken links. Lepiane estimates that this, alone, saves her team anywhere from 8 to 20 hours of work per month.
- Efficiency & Reliability: When new data comes in, Workday Adaptive Planning automatically pushes that information everywhere it needs to go in the system. If a new General Ledger account is created, for example, Workday Adaptive Planning goes through and adds this new account data to every relevant income statement in the system. The efficiency and reliability of such a system provides Lepiane and her team with real peace of mind that the data they are working with is complete and correct at all times.
- Ease of Use: Because Workday Adaptive Planning has an intuitive and robust interface, it’s very easy for users to build the formulas and models they need. And after they are finalized, it’s easy to apply them to the exact areas they are needed, whether that’s to a specific sheet in the system or to all data sets everywhere
- Robust Dashboarding: OfficeConnect integrates with Excel and PowerPoint, making it quick and easy to grab the latest data in the system and create dynamic bar charts, pie charts, and graphs to surface key insights.
- Multi-Output Options: After data is aggregated from the various departments, projects, and activities within an organization, OfficeConnect allows users to organize it into board decks, management reports, financial forecasts, budget proposals, and other planning docs and then output them as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and even web files.
Lessons Learned from the Rollout of Workday Adaptive Planning
As a long-time user of Workday Adaptive Planning, Lepiane shared the following key lessons learned from each of the implementations she has participated in:
- The implementation team should spend a lot of time on the up-front planning and think about the information that they want to get out of Workday Adaptive Planning and how they want it to look. Lepiane has learned that the more time spent thinking in advance about how the system should be designed and how reporting should be configured, the better suited the new system will be to the needs of the organization.
- She also stressed the importance of future planning. If the implementation team takes the time to imagine how their organization will be using Workday Adaptive Planning in the future, they can then build in the design elements they will need at a future date. Focusing on this step can save a lot of time and effort down the road because the Finance team won’t be stuck trying to integrate new systems or new data streams into a system that is already up and running.
Final Note
To hear the interview in its entirety, click here.
Looking for more resources on the benefits of moving from spreadsheets to Workday Adaptive Planning? Check out these resources.