Seattle Sounders scores big with cloud planning.

“Workday Adaptive Planning is critical for our ticket revenue planning. As the season progresses and estimates change, it allows us to change our revenue assumptions.”—Vice President of Finance

Seattle Sounders score big with cloud planning.

For the Seattle Sounders, "innovation" isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a winning strategy. The soccer club’s ability to constantly develop new ways to compete nationally resulted in massive growth over five short years. But becoming a Major League Soccer expansion side and winning more trophies than any other American team over the past decade, in addition to playing in front of more than 40,000 fans per game, left finance struggling to manage complex budgeting and reporting processes with their existing, outdated tools. When executives wanted to see the impacts of various scenarios, such as signing another player or investing in resources for the coaching staff, the reports took weeks to generate. To make matters worse, multiple data sources generated confusion and a lack of confidence in the numbers.

Today, Workday Adaptive Planning gives the Sounders access to the data and insights it needs to help decision-makers innovate and keep the team one step ahead of the competition.

Workday Adaptive Planning has been really critical for our revenue planning, specifically for our ticket revenue planning.

Vice President of Finance

Challenges.

  • Outdated tools can’t keep up. As revenue streams proliferated, ticket sales skyrocketed and player and coach headcount multiplied, spreadsheets were too slow and error-prone to keep up.

  • Slow scenario modeling. When owners and executives asked to see the impacts of various scenarios, such as hiring more coaches or adding more games, finance had to manually generate spreadsheets and line up data and assumptions to generate reports—a process that took weeks.

  • Multiple data sources. As the Sounders grew, the systems and software to support them generated even more sources of data, budgets and plans were created in silos, and there was a general lack of confidence in the numbers.

Results.

  • Managing growth easily. Workday Adaptive Planning gives the Sounders the flexible and powerful tools it needs to plan for the playoffs, expand player rosters, invest in "infrastructure", and continue its growth trajectory with confidence.

  • Faster insights and robust modeling. The Sounders use the Workday Adaptive Planning robust machine learning capabilities to blend financial and operational data for scenario planning and modeling.

  • Single source of truth. With a single source of truth available in real time and in the cloud, the Sounders can now manage multiple teams with complex finances all with confidence in the numbers.

Using different scenarios for different deals gives me a huge amount of confidence that when I say that we can afford to do this, we can really afford to do it.

Vice President of Finance


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