Ideas for a CFO Replacing an excel-based budgeting/planning process?

Sonng,

We have been partnering with Adaptive Planning for a few years now and have completed some of their largest implementations to date. We also have had clients who have outsourced parts of their FP&A process to us where we have actually run Adaptive Planning on their behalf. So we know AP from both an implementer's and end-uer's perspective.

If Adaptive Planning can meet your requirements (and it usually can for most SMB's), it is a great value. Apart from the planned downtime (around twice a year & this occurs late at night over the weekend), I have never experienced Adaptive Planning being down.

I have seen AP perform very well in large user count environments (~150 users) -- in fact, I have witnessed no noticeable difference in performance for clients with few users (<10) vs many users (>100).

It is generally very easy to use for end users. Although there is a little longer learning curve (as you'd expect for any software) for administrators -- especially those who want to leverage AP's functionality to its fullest.

AP has built in security around user-based permission controls.

If you want to learn more feel free to reach out to me directly at bill.aiken@abacistgroup dot com.

Sonng

I actually did a comparison of the two products not too long ago. The following might be a bit wordy...

Product History - Adaptive Planning is a more modern application built “after the internet”. Oracle has many products in this area, generally aged in nature, including acquisitions of Hyperion and Brio. The Oracle legacy is multiple products and higher costs with greater complexity and risk.

Products - When acquiring Oracle ensure you acquire ALL the products needed to meet your requirements. Customers should be extremely diligent in understanding Oracle product list and each products purpose, relevance, cost and value.

Deployment Options - Implementing hosted solution avoids associated hardware, software and IT (installation, upgrade management, etc.) costs. Note that components of Hyperion can be hosted under a traditional ASP model.

Single solution for budgeting, forecasting and reporting-Adaptive Planning provides a single solution. Hyperion’s most equivalent product (Hyperion Planning) is a combination of modules and datasets. IT expertise needed for administration and understanding underlying calculations/DB structures and associated tuning and maintenance. Integration tools need to be acquired to ensure Hyperion products can “talk to each other”.

Reliability-Adaptive Planning is “always on” and available. Essbase requires downtime (recalculation, database tuning/maintenance, updating system structures, etc.).

Ease of Use-Significant training and education is required to implement and manage Hyperion. Essbase requires unique skills.

Cost of Licensing- Adaptive Planning’s SaaS pricing allows their customers to start with an inexpensive deployment, develop and expand their application and invest alongside value creation. Typically, AP's subscription is less than the ongoing maintenance for Hyperion Planning.

Frequency/Cost of Upgrades-Upgrades to Adaptive Planning are included with the subscription fees. Oracle typically will include upgrades within annual maintenance but have periodically charged exceptional/migration fees with major upgrades so customers should be aware that there may be unexpected potential future costs. Customizations may not upgrade successfully (e.g. needed custom script).

Cost of Services and Risk-Adaptive Planning implementations are typically fast (average implementation time is less than 20 consulting days). Hyperion Planning implementations are typically of greater length/slow and customers often never complete their implementation. References should be used to compare cost and risk.

Implementation and Support-Adaptive Planning’s size and SaaS/renewal focus ensures AP provides superior service. Support is provided by teams with the same training and expertise as implementation consultants (escalation allows for immediate involvement of your implementation team if appropriate). Adaptive Planning provides unlimited and free access to training videos, materials and documentations including training on all new features.

Flexibility-Adaptive Planning allows centralized and unique cell-based calculations for sophisticated modeling. Hyperion Planning is more formally centralized so regional/local requirements may not be able to be modeled easily/may require custom code.

On The Fly-Hyperion Planning is unable to absorb typical “on the fly” processes (e.g. adding new accounts, departments, versions, business rules) without significant administration effort and offline time.

Calculations-More complex cross functional business rules and relationships may require custom coding to deliver in Hyperion Planning.

End User-AP's purpose, simple and consistent built web interface allow zero footprint deployment. Excel may appear to be easier but has issues (synchronization of offline, control of template, replication, speed of performance, etc.). Hyperion Planning has many interfaces (further complexity added if deployed alongside other Oracle products).

Ongoing Costs/ROI-As written in the Wall Street Journal, 2002, Microsoft stated that “the initial purchase is usually only 5% of the total cost of owning and maintaining a program”. Oracle implementations are extremely expensive initially, but when the total cost of ownership is examined all customers should consider the expected benefits/savings versus total cost of investment.

Hope that helps.