WNS Cuts Annual Budget Cycle with Adaptive Planning
Exactly how much of an efficiency improvement can collaborative, cloud-based finance tools bring to your business?
For WNS Global Services, upgrading from conventional financial budgeting methods to Adaptive Planning, part of the Adaptive Suite, cut the time taken by the company to complete its budgeting cycle by 50 percent.
Complexities in Budgeting—A Result of Fast-Growth, Global Reach, and Scale
WNS is a leading NYSE-listed Business Process Management (BPM) company known for implementing technology-centric processes both internally and for its clients. While the company had automated most of its FP&A processes, financial budgeting was still done using traditional methods.
Moreover, WNS was growing at a rapid pace. With over 200 global clients in its roster, 600 business processes to deliver across 34 global delivery locations, closing the budgeting cycle would take 25 financial analysts and about five months, given the intricacies involved.
WNS was thus prompted to look for a technology solution that would match up to its technology-focused corporate culture, while helping create an efficient budgeting process.
'Adaptive'—The Right Choice
Oracle Hyperion and Adaptive Planning were in contention when WNS started evaluating solutions. WNS felt that Adaptive would meet the organization's requirements based on a proof-of-concept. WNS chose to implement Adaptive within an aggressive timeframe of 40 days for its upcoming annual budget.
Adaptive Partner Delivers Implementation
WNS needed a talented, dedicated partner to help meet this deadline. The organization found one in Deflytics Software—an Workday Adaptive Planning partner that specializes in business intelligence and analytics implementation.
"Deflytics did a great job for us," said Serish, General Manager, Finance at WNS. "They delivered the project ahead of time, in spite of several design evolutions that we went through during the implementation."
More Time for Deeper Analysis
With the budget cycle and profitability analysis process cut in half, WNS's team of analysts, once engaged in tedious data collation, could now focus their attention on deeper analysis.
"We can now perform a deeper and more meaningful level of analysis with Adaptive. This kind of a granular analysis will give us a better visibility into our spending and costs. Our financial consolidation process is faster, and we have a tighter overall grip on the budgeting process. This year we spent more time on analysis and were able to point out areas in which we can improve upon in the future." said Arijit Sen, Head Corporate Strategy, WNS.
With Adaptive the company's allocations are completely automated and the annual budget is presented to the Board of Directors in half the time. That leaves much more time for a wide variety of analysis, including:
• Deeper drill-down into data behind the final numbers
• Changing annual assumptions to create different "what-if" scenarios
• Building a broader set of financial reports to better analyze data
The time saved by automated budget rollups, consolidation, and allocation has the WNS team thinking about bigger financial efficiency goals. This will help manage the complexity of the business and scale further.
