Prophix vs. Workday Adaptive Planning

Prophix is substantially out of the box product to be easy to use but flexible enough to allow for varied business modelling. No technical skills are required to deploy and maintain the solution. Owing to its out of the box nature, departing from Prophix sweet spot e.g. when leveraging transactional data, the solution is not as capable, however this is being addressed by the new Prophix release.

Incentivized

In a previous company, I was hired based on my experience with Workday Adaptive Planning. After being hired and reviewing the company, I quickly determined they were not large of enough of a company to need the program. Instead, we made better Excel budget templates, utilized OneDrive and created a better experience without the cost. Left the job after 9 months because I worked my way out of the position. My next role I looked for bigger companies and had better success with implementation.

Incentivized

• Reports are very customizable - once you learn how to create reports, it is really easy to design the final output you'd like.
• The tool is easy to use, especially for those that don't work in the finance function.
• It offers an excellent workflow capability to send out tasks to cost center owners all over the company.
• We love the ability to create and customize cubes.

• Version Management. Adaptive lets us manage many versions/scenarios all in one platform with the robust ability to compare them to each other.
• Processing Performance. With the Elastic Hypercube technology that was implemented a few years back, we can watch changes flow through a complex web of formulas and arrive at an answer within seconds.
• Audit Trail. Our administrators love the ability to see and report on who made what changes when, which leads to real accountability within the organization.

Incentivized

• Version control; there are issues using the same budget version in multiple years if adding detail (line item detail). What Prophix has explained as a benefit is a huge detriment for us and we've been working with them for 6 months on a fix and it's yet to get resolved
• There are certain aspects that a messy; within our budgeting and forecasting detail, we have "unexplained balance" lines that show up that are distracting and add no value.
• Lack of a centralized location for content outside of tool; for example, training, help, support, intranet, etc are all separate websites and not easy to get to. I'm not sure why all of this isn't linked to the same account and accessible through the tool. Why should we need separate passwords for everything Prophix?!

Incentivized

• Web reports and sheets are not great for in-depth reporting, and require the use of the OfficeConnect for Excel plugin and, therefore, the use of Excel for extensive reporting capabilities.
• It has limited formula functionality in some instances, requiring again the use of OfficeConnect for Excel for extensive calculations.
• I would like to see new planning sheet types or upgrades to existing sheet types; functionality has been the same for over 10 years.

Incentivized

The system works well for us, and meets all of our needs. All of our future plans can and will be achieved within Prophix, so there is no need to pursue another product. Prophix has continuously proven to improve their product over the years, which provides an even higher level of confidence in this tool, and future developments

For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.

The
data can be sliced and diced many ways, and each user is able to do it however
they like. It is easy to create or run existing reports. We have made many of
our processes more efficient, and Prophix has allowed us to save more time than
you can imagine. We
are able to use Prophix for Expense tracking, Expense and Capital planning, reforecasting,
Compensation planning, Project tracking, Expense allocation, GAAP PLOB
reporting, and still have several more tasks to implement through Prophix

Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.

The availability in Prophix is relatively good. We have occurred random outages in different versions that wipe out data, which can be brought back. Or we have ran into system wide slowness that impacts all users in the system, but we have been able to get more capacity to supply our performance.

Incentivized

There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.

Prophix has always performed consistently. We are using on-premise so many factors can contribute to slower than desired performance, most having nothing to do with Prophix itself. If we move to the web-client cloud based solution I believe performance will even be better.

Incentivized

All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.

The Prophix staff is very helpful and quick to respond. I like that they teach me instead of doing it for me when possible, so I don't have to contact them as often! Never talked to anyone at Prophix that I didn't respect or think highly of! Very professional, great customer service!

Incentivized

Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.

Incentivized

The initial integration consultant was very helpful in making sure we were set up with all the essential uses we required: reporting/budgeting/forecasting. There was a learning curve but our consultant made it very easy to understand and helped me be comfortable in my Global Admin role in the system. Even after integration, we were given support whenever I came up with an idea I would get in touch and I would be trained on how I can implement it.

Incentivized

This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.

Incentivized

We used our system and created a test cube to work with our own data. We ran through the different functions of Prophix and covered alot of material. We did two sessions a week, with homework tasks assigned. We were able to ask questions and cover any questions during the followup sessions.

Incentivized

They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.

Incentivized

Planning, planning, planning. Prophix will send you some Excel spreadsheets ahead of implementation. If those spreadsheets are complete, implementation will be smooth. Also, set aside some time during implementation to work with the Prophix staff and ask lots of questions. The knowledge they share is invaluable.

Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.

Incentivized

I have used other budgeting and forecasting tools at different companies, and Prophix is a much easier product to use and implement. I have received better user feedback from Prophix compared to other tools I have used at other companies. Other tools lacked dashboard capabilities and account reconciliations.

Incentivized

For best-in-class capabilities, you'll very likely need to split the various HR and financial systems into separate systems rather than using a consolidated platform like Workday. However, a consolidated platform provides benefits by being a single location for employees and a single system for IT developers to work with. This would need to be compared to employee efficiencies gained by working with better systems.

Incentivized

I gave Prophix a 10 on scalability because we currently deploy the solution to department heads across our entire organization and never have any issues with those individuals using or accessing the system to look at their financial information within premade templates . They currently enter budgets and review reports within the system currently. The only issue is they cannot typically use the ad hoc functionality because that would require higher level licenses that cost more and it is not worth it to give them more costly licenses since they really aren't working in the system quite like the robust finance users

Incentivized

We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale

• Prophix has made it possible to move away from some Excel reporting we were doing, which allows for 50% quicker reporting on a monthly basis.
• Although it has saved us time, an improved PowerPoint feature that automatically updates our decks would save an additional 75% on top of what we already do.
• Our Board Reporting has improved by 10 hours by moving our reports fully into Prophix.

• it is easier to take critical business decisions in the organization and respond to stakeholder early
• migration of resources like cloud, servers or operating system or migrations does not lead to impact on platform
• helps calculates complex metrics requires for financial and resource planning

Incentivized