Unlocking Insights: An Adaptive Planning Case Study
The Navigators, a global Christian ministry, needed to gain more business insights while streamlining its finance processes. Thanks to Kainos and Workday Adaptive Planning, The Navigators can now unlock new insights to spur future growth.
Overcoming finance complexity
With members spread across the globe, The Navigators’ finance team struggled to track the organization’s vast fundraising apparatus.
“Each missionary fundraises their whole salary and budget, so we are basically tracking more than 2,000 little businesses,” said David Joslin, Senior Finance and Accounting Manager at The Navigators. “In addition, we also track all our corporate spending, investments, and other departments. None of it is terribly complex on its own, but the sheer number of cost centers can be overwhelming.”
“One challenge for us as a non-profit is that we transfer a lot of money around, which can be time-consuming to track,” added Eric Olson, Senior Project Manager at the Navigators.
While The Navigators had a financial planning tool in place, it often created more problems than it solved. “We struggled with its user interface, which wasn’t intuitive. A lot of the integrations we were promised never happened, which required mass data uploads between systems on our part. That required a lot of manpower; we spent about two weeks during the budgeting season just uploading data,” Joslin said.
Unlocking agility with Workday Adaptive Planning
The Navigators had explored Workday Adaptive Planning when it had chosen its previous tool. When it came time to replace that tool, the choice was a no-brainer.
“We had been watching the product for years,” Joslin said. “Given our Workday roadmap, we knew that Workday Adaptive Planning was going to be an important part of our strategy. There really weren’t a lot of other cloud-based finance products we were interested in considering at that point.”
With Workday Adaptive Planning, The Navigators would be able to make its planning and forecasting more comprehensive and cohesive, while also leveraging a superior user experience to help get more people throughout the organization involved in the planning process.
“There’s no way we could have built the interactions or architected the model on our own,” Joslin added.
Achieving greater time-to-value with Kainos
While The Navigators knew they wanted to move forward with Workday Adaptive Planning, they also knew they couldn’t do it alone.
“Kainos immediately stood out as our partner of choice,” Olson said. “We felt they best understood our complexities. The level of dedicated Workday Adaptive Planning experience they brought to the table, the number of customers they’ve implemented for, and their non-profit experience was just what we were looking for.”
Navigating the deployment journey
In addition to managing the budget for their sprawling organization, the finance team at The Navigators was also busy helping their leaders develop and execute a new long-term strategic plan. The Navigators relied on Kainos’ expertise so that the finance team could focus on their other work.
“My job is to keep things on time, on budget, and within scope, and we were able to absolutely nail that,” said Olson. “For any project to go that well is rare.”
Over the six-month deployment, Kainos worked with The Navigators team to deploy the software, create detailed new models they previously lacked, create a suite of new reports, and train users.
“The solution architect we had on our project was awesome. We absolutely had a dependency on her. We couldn’t have done it without her. No one on the team missed a detail, and it was very obvious they had worked together before,” Olson said.
Positioning The Navigators for the future
Thanks to Kainos and Workday Adaptive Planning, The Navigators now have a financial planning tool capable of meeting the organization’s needs today while preparing the organization for future growth.
“We’ve definitely augmented our capabilities,” Joslin said. “For example, we are now able to break out our travel contract services and other supplier data, which we couldn't access in the past. We can now do much more detailed planning for each of our cost centers.”
Intuitive processes and automation allowed the team to significantly slash its manual efforts by as much as 50%. “We used to require a few rounds for our budgeting cycle. This year we did it in one round. I knocked out the finance department budget in an hour, which used to take eight hours. Overall, we took three weeks out of the budget process and I didn’t hear one complaint,” Joslin said.
The Navigators also gained new flexibility in its forecasting process. Because donations are unpredictable, the finance team can now leverage rolling forecasts to update the budget on the fly as donations come in to help organizational leaders make smarter decisions about spending.
In addition, drag-and-drop report building makes it simple to build reports and uncover new insights. “Users can just slice the data however they want without submitting a ticket to get someone else to build it,” Joslin said.
What's Next...
The Navigators is now better positioned to meet the growth goals laid out by leaders in the strategic plan so it can impact even more people around the globe.
“Moving forward, we’re going to be able to leverage more frequent and detailed forecasting and reporting,” Joslin said. “Now that our users know how easy it is for us to slice and dice data for them, they feel more free to make requests of us. They’re going to be able to use more data, more often, when making decisions.”