Restructuring Workday Adaptive Planning for Future Growth
How our Workday Adaptive Planning team optimized an automotive service retailer’s existing solution, streamlining internal processes, expanding user access, and enabling faster, more informed decision-making.
Client
Belle Tire is an American tire, wheel, and automotive service retailer offering new tires, tire repairs, free alignment checks, and more. Headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, Belle Tire operates at nearly 200 locations across the Midwest in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.
Challenge
Belle Tire had been using Workday Adaptive Planning for the last five years, but was only utilizing 10-15% of its functionality. After transitioning to SAP, they determined they needed to do a complete reset of their Workday Adaptive Planning instance.
Following EisnerAmper’s review, we identified several key opportunities for enhancement, including system performance, reporting consistency, data collection, and real-time dashboards. Previously, reporting across corporate and store teams relied on month-end closures and data pulled from multiple platforms — often requiring significant effort to combine. This limited the time available for analysis and slowed insights into strategic initiatives.
If you don't build it from the get-go, it's difficult to do it midway when you've already established budgets and forecasts, so this was a good opportunity to get it right from the beginning.
Approach
From Belle Tire’s previous experience implementing Workday Adaptive Planning, they knew they wanted a firm that would not just rebuild their instance but would guide them through the process to empower future changes. Their main goals were to have budgets flow properly and to create more customizable dashboards for more accurate forecasting.
EisnerAmper responded by assessing Belle Tire’s current setup, demonstrating the platform’s full capabilities, evaluating current pain points, and aligning on a future-state vision. The EisnerAmper team then built the core dimensions and cubes needed for cross-platform integration, enabling Belle Tire to adapt and evolve the system with ongoing support and training.
Results
The implementation of the new Workday Adaptive Planning instance drastically improved the way Belle Tire operates by streamlining internal processes, expanding user access, and enabling faster, more informed decision-making. Real-time dashboards and simplified data access replaced manual reporting, creating scalable systems that support consistent communication and long-term growth.
Increased Internal Efficiency
Time Savings Through Streamlined Data Collection
Real-Time Forecasting and Proactive Insights
Increased Internal Efficiency
The new instance expanded access from a handful of users to over 600 throughout the company, allowing team members across locations to access dashboards and transactional data quickly. This shift eliminated tedious email requests and improved collaboration between corporate and retail teams. This simple improvement established a scalable process that allows for future growth and streamlined communication. The closing process was an ongoing monthly task which couldn’t be reviewed easily at any other interval prior to reaching month-end. With the automatic live updates in the new instance and the ability to initiate a manual update, Belle Tire has near constant access to the current state of the business.
It’s a massive transition. It's been very much life-changing for a lot of people in terms of the ability to actually do work rather than just pull data from one source to another; that's just life-changing.
Time Savings Through Streamlined Data Collection
With the original instance, Belle Tire’s finance team spent most of the month manually gathering data across multiple platforms — from point-of-sale, purchasing, and accounting — rather than analyzing it to determine future growth opportunities. These disconnected processes led to delays in reporting, limited visibility, and restricted insights.
Through the partnership with EisnerAmper, Belle Tire has seen a significant reduction in the need to pull data manually. The new Workday Adaptive Planning instance contains all general ledger details, transaction summaries, KPIs, and unit data for real time accessibility. Reports are no longer built independently of each other and require team member support; now, end users across the organization can view all reports with a few simple clicks.
Before, it was like 80/20 — 80% of the time was spent pulling data, and only 20% was spent analyzing it. Now, it’s flipped. Your data is just there. You just need to make sure it’s in the proper format, and then you actually get time to analyze it.
Real-Time Forecasting and Proactive Insights
The review of real-time sales data was a critical piece missing from the previous instance and a clear focus when it came to building out the new instance. A new 4-5-4 retail calendar structure enabled daily sales and profit reporting, replacing the limited monthly view. Dashboards now update daily, helping store teams spot trends, standardize weekly comparisons, and align sales cycles with seasonal trends.
What the team built now enables us to report everything as of last night. We can report on daily sales, daily unit sales, and gross profit as of the day before. You don’t need to wait until we close the books to get that insight
As the team looks ahead, Belle Tire plans to improve the frequency of updates further to allow for the reporting stratum to refresh every 15 minutes.
Workday Adaptive Planning
Contact Us
Contact us today to learn how EisnerAmper can help you optimize your operational framework and leverage data for informed decision-making.