Share your experience using SAP Profitability and Performance Management

As a company grows and expands into multiple regions with different currencies, the level of complexity increases. At that point, Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud becomes a better solution. Based on a company's revenue and size, there is a threshold where they need to transition to a better tool to handle the increased complexity.

The tool improves the organizational budgeting process in several ways. One significant aspect is the extensionable functionality it offers. To illustrate, consider a scenario where a company has factories in Mexico producing Volkswagen and Kentucky producing Ford. 

When employees in Mexico input their budget and forecasts, they only see the relevant products and processes applicable to their location. Similarly, employees in Kentucky have access to data pertinent to their operations. This functionality streamlines the user interface experience by dynamically filtering information based on relevance. It eliminates the need for users to sift through irrelevant options, akin to the inconvenience of scrolling through a lengthy dropdown menu to select a state when a simple text entry could suffice. Having that capability essentially means that the system recognizes your location, like being in New York, and automatically presents relevant information.

I think it's pretty powerful for where they are right now. It fits the bill for people seeking a solution for planning and budgeting. And it probably fits the bill better than most products out there. One of the nice things about it is its power and versatility. Anything you can do in a spreadsheet, you can do in this product. It has all the power of a spreadsheet and fixes issues like security, data integrity, and the standard errors in spreadsheets. So, taking away the drawbacks of Excel and replacing them with good features is a fantastic capability they have. Most people who get these products previously created all their budgets and forecasts in Excel. The fact that it's the next step in evolution speaks volumes about their development.

The tool incorporates AI functions encompassing budgeting, forecasting, and transactions at the macro and micro levels. On the other hand, OneStream seems more focused on reporting, planning, and budgeting functionalities. Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud's approach seems more holistic, leveraging its ERP products, while OneStream focuses more on specific functionalities relevant to its product offerings.

The tool's interface is outdated. However, OneStream is easier to navigate. 

The tool's customer service is fairly good. Outsourcing to India has taken some time to get up to speed, but they are now well-trained. Additionally, they have domestic senior resources, allowing for quick escalation of complex issues.

However, they can also concentrate on enhancing the process. This means that even though you may start with basic support, you can be escalated to higher levels with better solutions or more quickly, which I believe they have accomplished.

Positive

Every company is unique, with different growth strategies and trajectories. Some companies focus on acquisitions to grow rapidly, while others prefer organic growth, expanding into new markets gradually. It depends on the company's specific growth goals and how they plan to achieve them. For example, a company aiming to grow from $100 million to $1 billion in revenue in two years will require different strategies than one aiming to increase from $100 million to $200 million in the next year.

I rate the product a nine out of ten.  

The typical use cases are implementing budgeting and planning and financial reporting and forecasting for clients. So, in their typical use cases, they either have an ERP like NetSuite or even Workday or Intact, and they want to bring in and integrate their actual data into Adaptive and then do all of their forecasting, planning, and budgeting in Adaptive. So it's pretty much used more as a budgeting and planning and reporting tool.

For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. 

So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.

For me, scalability is a valuable feature. So Adaptive scales well. For example, you can have ten users, you could have a thousand, and create as many models within the tool as you want without any degradation or performance issues. So, that's one of the biggest benefits of Adaptive.

The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up.

So, there could be room for just improving the integrations, making it easier to integrate outside systems within the tool.

I have been using this solution for 12 years. I use the version that was released in 2023. They do two releases a year for Workday. So, I work with the latest version 2023 R2, which is the version everybody's on.

I would give it a nine out of ten for stability. There can be downtime. They do maintenance on weekends when the tool is down, but there can be some downtime.

I give it a nine out of ten for scalability. The only issues you might run into are Fortune 500 companies probably would struggle to implement a tool like Adaptive that may not work with a hundred thousand types of records. But it's very good for most large organizations.

The customer service and support are pretty good. We can send in tickets, and they're usually pretty responsive. They usually have very good know-how to really help with whatever issue we have.

Positive

I had used something called Microsoft Forecaster which is no longer in license, not in production. So, I was in the license a while ago, and so that was my prior experience. Because it was the end of life. And, also, the Microsoft product was it was very clunky and cumbersome to try and create new versions. So it took a long time to do that.

So, that's why we switched to Adaptive.

To completely deploy it, you need a partner. It's not overly complex, but the formulas you need to write to do calculations require some expertise in order to configure those.

I see an ROI. The functionality that we have gives a return because we can make quicker and better decisions from a planning standpoint. 

So, we can get a return even within the first year, assuming that we're using the tool the right way.

12 years ago, it was very affordable. Workday has definitely increased its price since it acquired Adaptive a few years ago. So, it's affordable.

But there are other more affordable solutions that have maybe eaten into the market share a little bit.

We looked at a company that is called Planful. It was host analytics, and then the other one was Prophix.

I would advise to look at all of the features within Adaptive. Make sure that you need all of the features that are available, but make sure you take advantage of all the features that Adaptive has. And so part of that would be maybe looking and contacting an implementation partner because the partners will be able to definitely steer clients in the right direction.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. The only drawback is that if very large clients, if you want to model to all the way down to every employee and you've got, a couple hundred thousand or so employees, it then becomes a very difficult implementation, but that's very few companies that are like that.