Ahead of the Curve: Inside the New York Mets’ Workday Adaptive Planning Transformation
How one of professional sports’ most iconic franchises is leading the way in operational and financial excellence
Client
The New York Mets are one of the most recognizable franchises in professional sports. But behind the roster moves and packed stadiums is a sophisticated organization that operates much like any large enterprise. Finance, human resources, legal, marketing, baseball operations, and dozens of other departments all coordinate, plan, and execute budgets that span multiple seasons and business cycles.
The Mets first adopted Workday Adaptive Planning (then Workday Adaptive Insights) in 2015 and later implemented Workday as their broader enterprise resource planning system. When Workday acquired Adaptive, the two systems became natively integrated, giving the organization a unified foundation for enterprise planning. By 2021, leadership saw an opportunity to rethink how they were using the platform and turn it into something much more powerful.
Challenge
Manual Processes and Low Adoption
Before the engagement began, much of the financial planning work across the organization was happening outside of their Workday Adaptive Planning instance entirely. Departments were building budgets and forecasts in Excel, then submitting them to the central finance team for manual consolidation. Keith McCloat, the Mets’ Senior Director of Financial Planning and Analysis, describes the environment at the time as fragmented and difficult to manage.
Even though Workday Adaptive Planning had been in place for years, many departments treated it as the finance team’s tool rather than their own. The system needed to be intuitive and valuable enough that end users would choose to work inside of it rather than around it.
The Complexity of a Sports Organization
Baseball operations activities account for more than half of the Mets’ business; this operations team makes plans according to an entirely unique calendar. Player contracts carry complexities like signing bonuses and performance incentives that all need to be modeled and tracked. For example, when a marquee player signs, the first step is not necessarily to celebrate what is being brought to the lineup. It's a series of financial questions, such as what the effect is on the ticket business and attendance projections, or how a signing bonus may be amortized.
A lot of it would go through me or Lauren [LoGiudice]. Other departments were submitting items to us outside the system, requiring us to manually enter them and resulting in repeated exchanges.
Approach
Getting the Foundation Right
The EisnerAmper team started by evaluating how Workday Adaptive Planning was configured and then identified opportunities to align the platform with system best practices. Much of the early work involved rethinking how models were structured and translating what tasks departments were doing in Excel into properly built system models that could be maintained and scaled over time.
Assumption-Based Planning
The most significant shift was moving from static, number-in-a-cell budgeting to assumption-driven planning. Rather than asking every department to manually calculate and submit exact figures, the team created models where key business drivers fed calculations automatically. A single metric like projected attendance count can now connect to five, ten, or more downstream models across the organization.
If we need to flex and say a big assumption is changing, everything updates with it. The end user just needs to sign off on it instead of doing a whole calculation themselves on the back end.
Tailored Solutions for Baseball Operations
One of the standout achievements was building a baseball operations-specific profit and loss model within Workday Adaptive Planning. This model was designed to reflect how the baseball operations team plans and reports, with budget lines mapped to season codes: regular season, spring training, and off-season. Actuals integrate automatically based on the same seasonal structure, making this report one of the least manual reports the team oversees and one that has generated positive feedback from the baseball operations side of the organization.
All the enhancements have made the planning process a lot smoother for us as well as our end users. It’s a lot less manual and a lot more automated. We’re able to multitask better and pivot to other work easier than just solely living in the world of Adaptive during our processes.
About EisnerAmper’s Workday Adaptive Planning Practice
EisnerAmper works with organizations across industries to get more out of their Workday Adaptive Planning investment. Whether an organization is implementing Workday Adaptive Planning for the first time or looking to drive broader adoption across departments, the team brings deep platform knowledge and a practical approach to every engagement.
Learn more about EisnerAmper's Workday Adaptive services or reach out to our team directly.