For the Kindred Group, one of the largest online gambling companies in the world, achieving massive growth, staying agile, and keeping up with global regulatory changes is table stakes. Operating in the heavily regulated gaming industry, while acquiring new companies around the world and processing 40 million transactions in 24 hours is no easy feat. And for many years, the Kindred Group managed the multi-layered, complex business model using spreadsheets. Eventually, its outdated approach couldn’t keep up with the pace of organizational and industry changes. It all came to a head when a budget sheet was accidentally deleted and three weeks’ worth of work was lost. The finance team realized there had to be a better way.
Today, powered by the agility, automation, and data accessibility made possible by Workday Adaptive Planning, the Kindred Group finance team easily manages complex budgets and forecasts, generates workforce plans, and stays ahead of substantive industry and regulatory changes. And agility? No longer out of reach.
Workday Adaptive Planning has been a huge time-saver for me and our team. To have one tool that allows all of those users to access and input data simultaneously has been a real game changer for us.
Senior Financial Analyst
Challenges.
Slow, error-prone financial planning processes. As new companies were acquired and financials became more complex, budgeting and forecasting processes took longer and errors became common.
Unable to respond to change with agility. Tracking regulatory and legal changes as they happened was complicated by ongoing mergers and acquisitions. Spreadsheets slowed things down, creating bottlenecks and leaving finance to play catch-up.
Inaccurate workforce plans. Manual spreadsheets couldn’t accurately model staffing scenarios, nor could they accurately capture fluctuations in the market, creating workforce plans that couldn’t keep up.
- Insufficient analysis. Spreadsheets didn’t provide the modeling and scenario tools the organization needed to support strategic decision-making.
Results.
Reduced budget and forecast cycle times. Automated processes have sped up cycle times significantly, increased the accuracy of budgets and forecasts, and improved the effectiveness of company plans.
Increased agility. From acquisitions to rapidly changing regulations, finance can now manage everything with agility and accuracy.
Effective workforce planning. The user-friendly Business Planning Cloud interface allows people throughout the organization to model various workforce plans, which enable stronger budgets and forecasts.
- Robust modeling. Finance and operational leaders can now run modeling queries and what-if scenarios to see the impacts of upcoming regulations, accommodate mergers and acquisitions, and track market fluctuations.
We use Workday Adaptive Planning for both workforce and headcount planning. Building in all the different tax rates across various different locations has enabled us to have a more accurate headcount forecast.
Financial Planning & Analysis Manager