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Adaptive Insights – Budgeting and Forecasting in the cloud

  • 19 July, 2016

Article, Business Intelligence

Introduction

Adaptive Insights is a cloud based business intelligence suite. Founded in 2003 as Adaptive Planning by Robert Hull and Richard Dellinger. Initially planned as an alternative to spreadsheets and larger on-premises software. Adaptive Planning was marketed as enterprise budgeting, forecasting and reporting software. In the early months of 2014 Adaptive Planning was rebranded as Adaptive Insights. In conjunction with the rebrand, a new version of the software was released with an overhauled user interface.

Adaptive Planning established itself in the CPM (Corporate Performance Management) market as a budgeting and forecasting tool. In recent years, additional modules have been added; Adaptive Consolidation (financial consolidation), Adaptive Discovery (dashboards & visualisations) and Adaptive Office Connect (Microsoft Office Suite integration).

These modules together form the full Adaptive Insights Suite.

Ease of use

One of the biggest strengths of Adaptive Suite is its ability to empower the finance team. A solution can be built and managed without requiring substantial learning or bringing in specialists from outside the company. Adaptive Insights offers a sophisticated modelling environment catering for a wide variety of requirements in an immediately familiar and easy to use package.

This balance between accessibility, familiarity and a sophisticated environment has fuelled Adaptive Insights’ success.

Customer Retention Data Image

As a cloud-based business performance management suite, Adaptive Suite delivers intuitive planning, forecasting, reporting and dashboards. Designed from the ground up for business users and accessible from anywhere, the Suite helps you plan effectively, visualise performance and monitor your results.

A selection of features & benefits

Agile, responsive and reliable. Adaptive Insights allows you to transform your balance sheet, cash flow plans, revenue forecasts, headcount analysis, budgeting and expense plans. Unwieldy Spreadsheets can be put on the scrap heap.

adaptive planning screenshot

Planning, modelling and forecasting that drives results. Centralised data, plans and models eliminate risk. Workflows allow you to accelerate planning to ensure that everyone is allocated a task.

Powerful financial intelligence and analytics let you instantly visualise variances, delve into their causes and take appropriate action.

Adaptive Discovery Dashboard

Perhaps the most encouraging thing about Adaptive Insights is that it hasn’t just captured one type of industry or one size of company. It has been adopted across a wide range of industries in small, medium and large enterprise companies.

More than 2,600 companies in 85 countries use Adaptive Insights. These range from mid-sized companies and nonprofits to large corporations, including AAA, Boston Scientific, CORT, Konica Minolta, NetSuite, Philips, and Siemens.

Source: Adaptive Insights

Adaptive Insights is consistently ranked highly in surveys rating both its ease and low cost of implementation.

Reports and briefs from 451 Group, Blue Hill Research, BPM Partners, Forrester Research, Nucleus Research, Ovum, Saugatuck, Ventana Group and others consistently recognize the cloud-based Adaptive Suite for its intuitive nature and ease of use. These accolades are based largely on surveys and comments from Adaptive’s community of over 2600 customers 

“Adaptive is exactly what we need for end-user ease of use. Our business users couldn’t interact with the previous system on their own,” said Kevin Bradshaw, Finance Director at Gentiva Health Services, Inc., the United States’ largest provider of home health and hospice services based on revenue.

“Adaptive Insights provides easy to use, cloud-based performance management solutions… These solutions are a strong alternative to spreadsheet-based and on-premise planning and reporting processes. Adaptive has once again received outstanding feedback across the board from its customers worldwide, in everything from the sales process, to support and implementation, to overall functionality and ease-of-use. Their ability to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction as they scale to thousands of customers is particularly impressive,” according to Craig Schiff, CEO of BPM Partners and the Vendor Landscape Matrix 

“Adaptive Planning won the highest praise from customers in our reference survey, citing ease of use and fast time-to-value,” according to “The Forrester Wave”: Financial Performance Management, Q3 2013″ report.

“We found that, in addition to the inherent benefits of a cloud application, Adaptive customers also cited usability as a competitive differentiator,” according to Nucleus Research in a report “Adaptive Insights Versus Oracle Hyperion. 

“In today’s society, you don’t have the time to turn a big ship slowly. You have to do it efficiently and effectively, and that’s where we see analytics within Adaptive Insights as a true driving force.” Kent Nate, CFO – Bonneville International

“With Adaptive Insights, we achieved a better budget process at a fraction of the cost compared to the millions of dollars and years of investment spent maintaining the on-premises solution.” Mark Powers, Sr. Finance Manager – Boston Scientific

Source: Adaptive Insights

  • With Adaptive Discovery you can monitor the metrics that matter, making it easy for your managers to see exactly how they are performing.
  • Automation is on hand to reduce risk and close faster with built in accounting intelligence.
  • Adaptive Consolidation simplifies journal entry management, automating reclassifications and financial reports.
  • Adaptive Reporting provides live reports which are accessible from anywhere. Anyone can build the reports they need by dragging and dropping within their browser. Alternatively, users can use Adaptive Office Connect for supreme formatting control.
  • Built on a powerful foundation and running an in-memory calculation engine for real-time analytics, the Adaptive Insights Suite delivers reliable collaboration from anywhere, web or mobile.
  • The Adaptive Integration Framework lets you integrate the Suite with your ERP, CRM or HCM data sources.
adaptive insights logo

Summing up

Overall, Adaptive Insights is a cloud solution which provides an organisation with the ability to make better, faster decisions. It can seamlessly take over from traditional SpreadSheet usage and offer a vast range of easily accessible features. Collaboration becomes not only more powerful, but easier too. Being able to do away with swapping files and carefully tracking changes and modifications adds both efficiency and reliability to your workflows. Adaptive has the ability to both improve productivity and deliver high quality results.

A tool that a finance team can set up, manage and utilise without a reliance on the IT department. Adaptive is a product built with the finance department in mind, it delivers the core ‘must have’ features allied with powerful advanced tools and reporting capabilities. All wrapped up in an intuitive, familiar and easy-to-use package.

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