Empowering Today’s Leaders with Workday Adaptive Planning
How a Workday Adaptive Planning solution helped a nonprofit streamline its budgeting process and make critical financial data accessible organization-wide.
Client
Founded in 1950, the Young Presidents’ Organization (“YPO”) is a global leadership community of chief executives. To join YPO, members must meet specific requirements and achieve significant leadership success at a young age. Once accepted into the program, members can attend YPO’s networking and peer-to-peer learning events, enabling them to become even more effective leaders. Today, YPO promotes idea exchange among 30,000 global members in 142 countries.
Challenge
YPO was already using Workday Adaptive Planning to manage its remarkably popular events. As the organization began modernizing and transforming its corporate finance processes, team members realized they could benefit from leveraging another instance of Workday Adaptive Planning, specifically for financial planning and analysis (“FP&A”). They saw how Workday Adaptive Planning helped their events business scale and wanted to achieve the same results for their finance team.
YPO sought a partner with extensive Workday Adaptive Planning experience. After interviewing several vendors, EisnerAmper stood out as the firm that could help YPO quickly access event data, manage budgets outside of Excel, and get everyone working together to grow the organization sustainably.
EisnerAmper had scheduled timelines, was very clear on what they needed from us, kept everyone on task, and had great communication. Everyone was very knowledgeable and followed through on their promises. That was so refreshing compared to what we experienced with the initial implementation.
Approach
YPO’s use of Workday Adaptive Planning didn’t support their programming efforts, let alone their day-to-day budgeting needs. We saw this as an opportunity to create a new instance of Workday Adaptive Planning configured specifically for YPO’s corporate finance team.
To get everyone on the same page, we hosted rigorous requirements-gathering sessions to understand YPO’s business model and what they might need from a corporate finance perspective. We noted what they liked and didn’t like about their Workday Adaptive Planning instance for events and weaved that input into our strategy.
With that information in mind, we took a structured project management approach, setting up multiple milestones to check progress and ensure everything was on track. We explained what we would need from YPO and what they should expect at the end of the project.
After setting users up in the system, we trained them to find and update their budgets and run forecasting reports. We also created processes and tasks to make it easy for the FP&A team to track their peers’ progress toward a yearly budget or monthly forecast completion. We were attentive to YPO’s concerns and stuck to our promise of delivering easier forecasting, more rigid tracking, and accurate financial reporting on organizational, departmental, and event levels.
Results
With help from experienced and focused EisnerAmper professionals, YPO centralized its data, simplified the budgeting and reconciling process, and set the stage for broader use of Workday Adaptive Planning and other Workday tools throughout the organization.
With their new Workday Adaptive Planning instance, YPO’s FP&A team can get the data they need at the click of a button without having to sift through Excel files, saving time and allowing the finance department to focus on more strategic projects.
Today, YPO’s FP&A team and 40 department budget owners have training and access to the Workday Adaptive Planning platform. Integrated processes and tasks allow budget owners to see what the finance team expects of them and when. Finance teams can also see who is updating their forecasts and who isn’t so that they can send reminders as due dates approach.
The YPO team described us as “clear and to the point.” We defined schedules, set clear expectations, and adhered to timelines. Beyond that, we brought an empathetic, patient, and enthusiastic perspective to the project. We always listened to and accommodated YPO’s needs and used our years of Workday Adaptive Planning experience and knowledge to implement the best solution possible. YPO continues to bounce ideas off our team, including new projects. Workday Adaptive Planning is now a jumping-off point for other objectives like tracking resources and headcount, advanced reporting, and more.
Today, we have a more professional, elevated presentation of data that’s readily available at [the] click of a button. Plus, we can use Process Tracker to help…complete quarterly forecasts. Getting…the entire organization to be more aware and engaged in forecasting quarterly using Workday Adaptive Planning, and not Excel, was just more efficient.
If you ask me if I’d recommend EisnerAmper, the answer is absolutely, yes.
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