Workday Unifies Financial and Workforce Planning With Transactions in One Cloud System

Workday, Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, today announced the availability of Workday Planning, the first planning, budgeting, and forecasting application that unifies financial and workforce planning in one system when combined with Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management (HCM). Organically built as part of Workday, the new application is designed for today’s dynamic business environment, allowing key stakeholders across an organization to collaborate on planning and continuously adapt to business changes in order to drive growth and performance. More than 50 organizations have already selected Workday Planning including CityMD, City of Orlando, and Netflix.
A Unified Planning System Built for Change
The world of financial and workforce planning today is disjointed, with data residing across multiple systems and silos of spreadsheets that require finance, HR, and business leaders to spend considerable time on manual calculations to ensure data integrity, rather than analysis and driving business outcomes.
To support the faster pace of business — whether it’s mergers and acquisitions, adopting new business models, or global expansion — organizations need to be able to make in-the-moment decisions about the future.
In response to market and customer challenges, Workday is delivering a new approach to enterprise planning that enables customers to:

• Configure Planning to Business Needs: Customers can define their plan structure for financial or workforce planning by month, quarter, or year, and use the plan generator to create baseline plans using historical or real-time finance and HR data in the system.
• Collaborate Across the Business: Planning teams can use Workday’s worksheets, which bring the familiarity and functionality of a spreadsheet into Workday’s secure enterprise environment, to create models and scenarios leveraging live transactional data, and then partner with key stakeholders to iterate and finalize a budget, forecast, or headcount plan.
• Continuously Plan and Execute on Budgets: While executing on plans, organizations can leverage real-time financial and management reporting capabilities with built-in analytics and visualizations to drill-down to track progress and make adjustments to budgets and forecasts as business or market shifts occur.

Workday Planning enables customers to take advantage of these benefits to evaluate the impact of investments, growth, and expansion strategies on the business in one system. For example, customers can use Workday Planning to:

• Evaluate Investment Viability with Ad hoc Forecasting: A vice president of financial planning and analysis can respond to a chief financial officer’s (CFO) request for a forecast on the impact of a new investment on the company’s profit and loss (P&L) statement through different modeling assumptions. Using existing financial, employee, and operational data in Workday, the vice president can create a driver-based model using collaborative worksheets — without the inefficiency of offline calculations and multiple versions — to analyze the investment’s impact on revenue, spend, and profitability, helping inform the decision of whether to proceed.
• Determine the Best Staffing Model to Support Growth: A CFO and chief human resources officer (CHRO) can collaborate to determine the best strategy to address rapid growth in the organization using Workday Planning to model different staffing scenarios such as how many contingent, full-time, and part-time employees are needed in each region. With Workday Planning, the CFO and CHRO can determine how staffing changes may impact budgets and financial performance, and collaborate with key stakeholders across the organization for alignment and execution.
• Better Manage Expansion Strategies and Costs: As CEOs look to expand their business regionally or globally, their teams must determine the office space, travel, and infrastructure costs required, and then compare these findings against other expansion strategies. With Workday Planning, a vice president of business development can update headcount forecasts on a tablet during a meeting with the executive team. From there, they can drill down into specific data such as open job requisitions, and then graphically showcase office space and budget required based on square footage per worker, travel between locations, or location-specific employee benefit costs.

Comments on the News
“Workday Planning has been a top request from our customers and we’re delivering on our promise to build an innovative planning system that works seamlessly with their existing Workday data,” said Mike Frandsen, executive vice president, products, support, and delivery, Workday. “With Workday Planning, customers — for the first time — will have a unified, collaborative, and continuous view of their business so they can make real-time decisions regarding their organization’s future, and ultimately drive performance.”
“In today’s fast-paced, high growth business environment, organizations are increasingly adopting cloud-based financial applications that enable them to quickly analyze data and make real-time strategic decisions,” said Mickey North Rizza, program vice president, Enterprise Applications and Digital Commerce, IDC. “In the case of enterprise planning, organizations are looking to evolve spreadsheet-driven processes in order to run their businesses more efficiently and better utilize resources. With Workday Planning, organizations will be able to leverage a new spreadsheet experience in the cloud, enabling a more collaborative and continuous approach to planning and in-the-moment strategic decision making.”
“Utilizing Workday’s unified finance and HR system has helped us continually scale our global business, which is why it was important to be part of shaping a new approach to enterprise planning that further aligns our finances and people,” said Riaan du Preez, director, finance and HR applications, Netflix. “We anticipate Workday Planning will extend the benefits of Workday, helping us improve consistency of data throughout the planning process and analysis of actuals versus forecasts.”
About Workday
Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. Founded in 2005, Workday delivers human capital management, financial management, and analytics applications designed for the world’s largest companies, educational institutions, and government agencies. More than 1,000 organizations, ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 enterprises, have selected Workday.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding the expected performance and benefits of Workday’s offerings. The words “believe,” “may,” “will,” “plan,” “expect,” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. If the risks materialize or assumptions prove incorrect, actual results could differ materially from the results implied by these forward-looking statements. Risks include, but are not limited to, risks described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended July 31, 2016 and our future reports that we may file with the SEC from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. Workday assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.
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