Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) facilitates commerce between airlines, travel agencies and technology providers across the travel industry. So it was particularly troublesome when it was struggling to coordinate planning between finance and business users within its own four walls. “Before Workday Adaptive Planning, things were bleak,” says Peter Reppen, director, FP&A, at ARC. “Our departments and our cost centers would send in their budget information, and then we would key it into Forecaster. And then we would get updates and key those into Forecaster, all the time thinking, ‘Why couldn’t our users do this?’”
That’s when ARC discovered Workday Adaptive Planning. With it, the company was able to automate its planning and reporting process, provide greater visibility into business performance, and give business users self-service reporting for a streamlined business planning process. “We no longer have to search for a specific spreadsheet with the information we desperately need. It’s now just a couple clicks away,” says Reppen.
Challenges.
- Manual processes. Manual data-entry processes were time-consuming and prone to errors.
- Complex planning. There was no simple way to maintain detailed revenue, personnel or capital plans, or to conduct meaningful scenario planning.
- Limited insight. Product and sales managers were unable to track operational information, performance metrics, or performance against budget, leading to limited data-driven decision-making.
Results.
- More time to plan. FP&A now has more time to plan at the product or customer level, better understand revenue drivers, and conduct scenario analysis to help inform business decisions.
- Faster reporting. The turnaround time for ad hoc analysis and reports was reduced from four days to three hours,
- Increased collaboration. Self-service reporting increased collaboration and ownership of the budget and forecasts among nonfinance business users—for instance, HR could instantly access reports instead of waiting hours like before.
We now have a system where finance does not have to dictate the processes or demand that the budget owners update the data. Our business leverages Workday Adaptive Planning for finance every day.
Director, FP&A