REANDA-NEWS. July 02, 2015. Workday, Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, today announced Workday Planning, a new planning, budgeting, and forecasting application. When combined with Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), Workday Planning is expected to be the industry's first system to unify real-time finance and HR data with analytics and enterprise planning. With Workday Planning, organisations will be able to create, collaborate, and take action on budgets and forecasts in one unified system built to continually optimise performance and drive business growth.

Enabling Growth with Collaborative, Continuous Planning
Today's business environment is dynamic; evolving market conditions, increased competition for talent, and a demanding investor audience are forcing organisations to be more agile and meticulous with financial and workforce planning. Current planning systems and point solutions lack real-time insight and often require manual calculations in spreadsheets residing outside of core financial and HR systems. This fragmented approach results in multiple versions of the truth and integration headaches, making it difficult to collaborate and take action at the pace the business requires.

Workday Planning will empower organisations to continuously plan and collaborate to drive strategic business outcomes and performance in line with company objectives across all critical stakeholders, including financial, HR, and operational leaders. Extending the value of Workday's architecture, Workday Planning will enable customers to easily configure business processes, and ensure compliance with embedded controls and an always-on audit trail at every stage of the budgetary lifecycle.

When available, Workday Planning will also enable customers to:

·      Easily Generate Budgets: With Workday's budget generator, customers will be able to combine historical actuals and budget data with modeling assumptions to automatically generate a baseline budget without the need for integrations with third-party systems. For example, financial planning and analysis teams can easily apply modeling assumptions such as projected growth rates to revenue and expense data to create a baseline budget.

·      Seamlessly Collaborate on Planning: Collaborative planning features will enable teams to create models and scenarios that they can share and edit with operational managers to finalise a budget or forecast, all within Workday's secure environment. Collaborative worksheets will merge the familiarity of a spreadsheet -- including embedding linking and advanced calculations -- with an interactive grid experience that is unique to Workday. For example, finance teams can use collaborative worksheets to enter budgetary information, and then share budget models with key stakeholders such as hiring managers who can review and align operational plans for their divisions, business units, or cost centers.

·      Better Manage the Continuous Budgetary Lifecycle: Once a plan is finalised, teams will be able to execute on the budget, track actuals, perform budgetary controls, and measure organisational performance against budget utilisation, using Workday's built-in analytics and reporting tools. With this insight, customers can then easily adjust plans and forecasts in a continuous manner, in one system. For example, a finance executive can access a dashboard to quickly view variances in actual values versus targets, and then will be able to drill down to better understand the root cause of the variance such as how open headcount is affecting sales targets. Based on those insights, the executive can then make the necessary adjustments in the system to make sure budgets and forecasts are aligned and accurate.

Availability
Workday plans to make Workday Planning generally available to customers in calendar year 2016.

Comments on the News
"In the face of constant change, today's business leaders have to come together to continually optimise financial and workforce performance, and uncover growth opportunities to remain competitive. This requires a new approach to planning, budgeting, and forecasting -- and a single system that supports collaborative and continuous planning at the core," said Mike Frandsen, executive vice president, products, support, and delivery, Workday. "We expect Workday Planning to be just that -- it extends the benefits of Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM -- bringing cross-functional teams together using one set of data in one system to plan, execute, measure performance, and adjust as the business requires to grow."

"Collaboration is part of every organisation's culture -- from emailing to document sharing, it's a natural part of an employee's workday. Unfortunately, most companies still rely on disjointed planning processes that lack the transparency, flexibility, security, and insights required of today's fast-paced business environment," said Christine Dover, research director, enterprise applications and digital commerce, IDC. "Workday Planning will help create a collaborative approach to planning, budgeting, and forecasting, where organisations can take action and make changes from one set of data, in one system."

Additional Information
Please visit the Workday blog for additional perspective about Workday Planning:

·      3 Takeaways on Workday Planning from Betsy Bland, vice president, financial management products, Workday

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. Hundreds of organisations, ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 enterprises, have selected Workday.