3 great updates in Adaptive Insights 3/6/20 release

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Adaptive Insights first new release this year (2020R1) will arrive for General Release to customers on March 6, 2020, and it has some exciting new features.

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Here are our favorite 3 enhancements.

1. Active Dashboards: combine multiple input sheets & charts on 1 screen

 

This is a game changer to simplify the End User planning experience. With Active Dashboards, we can combine one or more planning input sheets with dashboard charts and text instructions all on one screen.

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Previously, an End User would need to switch between 2 or more screens to plan data from different sheets.

The planner, for example, might have first opened a "List Price by Product" planning sheet to update one cell with a product price change, and then open a second "Revenue Planning by Product & Customer" sheet to update units sold by product and customer, and then open a 3rd browser tab to see a "Revenue Dashboard" chart visually. If the planner was lucky, she had 2 monitors to be able to view 2 sheets or tabs at the same time.

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With the new Active Dashboards, we can now place all 3 of those elements together (the List Price by Product input, the Units Sold by Product and Customer input and the chart output) all on one screen along with text instructions guiding the Planner how to complete the process.

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For large models with scores of input sheets, this will greatly streamline the planning process and enable modelers to focus their planners on the key details necessary to complete the planning process.

 

2. Smart Imports to Modeled Sheets: update select data rather than fully replacing all data

 

During planning cycles, we often found that our customers would want to refresh data in planning sheets from external applications like payroll or CRM to reflect the latest data. However, because they had combined data from an external system with columns of data keyed directly into Adaptive Insights on the same planning sheet, there wasn't an easy way to update the external data without wiping out the data they had input directly into Adaptive Insights.

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With the new release, we will be able to make targeted updates to select columns from external source systems through leveraging a row key (like an Employee ID or a Sales Opportunity Number) . So we no longer need to delete an entire row (and loose the planning inputs that we worked hard to create) before refreshing the externally sourced data.

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This can be managed through the manual spreadsheet import or automated data integration.

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This will enable various use cases such as updating headcount plans as external job requisitions get created and hired. Or update sales plans with your sales team's latest CRM inputs as sales opportunities amounts or close dates change without impacting the columns containing plan drivers input into Adaptive Insights.

 

3. Hide modeled Columns from specific Users: allow more users to see Personnel plan detail without seeing pay

 

Salary data is sensitive. Not all planners should be able to see individual employees' salaries. While Adaptive Insights has always allowed configuration of user roles where certain roles could see the Workforce & Personnel Planning sheets while others could not see it, it was an all or nothing option. A user could either see all of the columns in a modeled sheet or the sheet would be hidden from a user altogether.

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We have had numerous clients that have asked us to allow some of their users see a subset of the columns in the Personnel planning sheet. For example, they want a user to be able to see their department's planned employees' names, position, employment start date, state, but not their employees' salary or healthcare plan selection.

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The new release now allows mixed access for the different columns of a modeled sheet, and this access which can even vary by Department or Level for an individual end user. So we can give a user Edit access to all columns of one department (see Level Development dept in example below); give the same user Edit access to a subset of columns for a second department (see Level Marketing dept has "Start Date" and "Per" editable while "Job Code" is read-only and "Pay Rate" is hidden); and then give provide that same user with read-only access to certain columns in a 3rd department combined with hidden data columns (see Level US Sales where no columns are editable but "Job Code", "Start Date" and "Per" are viewable while "Pay Rate" etc. are hidden).

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We are excited to help our clients take advantage of the 3 great new features in Adaptive Insights. With changes like these, we can see the fruit of the R&D investment that Workday is investing into Adaptive Insights and hope you will too.