Most businesses do planning and budgeting using spreadsheets. Everyone knows how to use them and they provide a good enough tool but, they are error-prone and time-consuming when it comes to sharing and collaboration. Links get broken and formulas have to be manually copied and pasted. Not a great solution when business moves at light speed or when things change, and they always do.

Plex, as a company, was dealing with these challenges for our business planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. Our financial team had inherited a massive spreadsheet that required a lot of manual manipulation and nightmarish version control, and at the end of the day, we weren’t really confident in the accuracy of the data. To sustain growth at the rate we were growing, we needed a financial planning and analysis solution that was easy, powerful, and fast.

That’s when our team reached out to Adaptive Insights. The active planning capabilities of the cloud-based Adaptive Insights product enabled us to gain one view of the truth that we could then share, discuss, and analyze instead of spending time on fixing formulas or searching for the right version. Because of this, we drastically reduced turnaround time for management insight and decision making—which was a huge benefit especially when we had to make changes to our strategy. We can also integrate our solution easily with Workday ERP. Now we essentially run our business planning on Adaptive Insights and can forecast out five years. Our model is a strategic tool that helps maximize our business: we reached our EBITDA goal in less than 12 months while maintaining resources to drive revenue.

We were so confident in this solution and the results we gained as a company that we saw the opportunity for you, manufacturers, to leverage active planning. We’ve partnered with Adaptive Insights to offer this capability to you. Many of our customers are actually using it now.

For example, Trojan Battery, the leading manufacturer of deep cell batteries often used in golf carts across North America, was experiencing growth across its four U.S. plants and nine distribution centers. The company relied on spreadsheets for financial planning and analysis after downloading data from Plex and other systems. Planning became complicated and error-prone as there were 200 spreadsheets and 1,200 tabs. It took hours to consolidate all the information to identify gaps and trends. After implementing Adaptive Insights, the company eliminated more than 150 spreadsheets and can look at the data on weekly or daily basis. This enables the company to see actuals and measure this against their plan to identify gaps and course correct without having to wait.

We’re excited to bring you the power of active planning. Discover how Adaptive Insights can help you. Register for our upcoming webinar, and say good-bye to manual and inaccurate spreadsheet financial planning and reporting.