SalesForce and Workday Adaptive are better together: Morpho's example
How Morpho is improving operations and forecasts by automating SalesForce data integration with Adaptive Planning
Adopting a forecasting system allows company to have a map to orient themselves and decide on their priorities, even in dynamic times.
Morpho Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President: President Kiyoshi Hiraga, below: Morpho), develops technology for image processing, and commercializes its software globally.
Shearwater is the leading consulting and technology partner for companies in Asia, and we work a lot with the foremost business planning cloud, “Workday Adaptive Planning”.
Let's dive in the project and its results.
An essential requirement identified early by the smart team at Morpho was the ability to pull data automatically from their CRM and sales support system based on Salesforce. Morpho was thinking about a system to measure the performance and to plan ahead as it prepares a further leap ahead in tech and commerce for its 15th anniversary. Working together, we have decided to implement Adaptive Planning as their business management system, because it is simple, powerful, used by more than 5,000 companies worldwide, and it allows to easily link with other systems such as ERPs and sales support system/CRM.
Adaptive integration from SalesForce, sample image
What's the goal of implementing Adaptive?
First, we need to explain what business areas are managed by the CRM system (Salesforce) and the planning system (Adaptive). Salesforce is used to aggregate data and manage sales forecasts in real time. In contrary, Adaptive is used to control recognized revenues as well as other corporate indicators such as expenses, and profits per units or deals in real time (“performance forecasts”), as well as managing the budgeting and planning progress from the beginning to the outputs.
With the introduction of this system, we aimed to improve the efficiency and sophistication of overall performance management. Before, Morpho used to distribute several Excel files to each department, and have them to enter budgets and outlooks, then gather and consolidate them at headquarters. This was long and error-prone. With Adaptive each department can directly input in the cloud, real-time. As a result, it is possible to eliminate the enormous amount of aggregation work, cumbersome Excel management, to improve work efficiency, and spend more time on “analytics work” which is the real focus of this effort. Not data entry or data massaging, thinking about what can happen, how it will happen and what to do.
Furthermore, in the past, budget and forecasts were managed completely separately from the sales forecasting. More than often the numbers were at odds with each other. The outlook is now much more reliable as it relies on the actual sales forecast, pipeline included. All this data is available to drill down to understand better what happens in sales, and get insights when simulating and planning. By seamlessly linking data, it is now easy to perform very detailed analysis as well as simulations.
(Checking the details of sales activities and pipelines from Adaptive Planning)
Two systems fitting perfectly together?
There are three main advantages of integrating Salesforce with Adaptive.
Improved efficiency: managerial and sales forecast where both necessary, doubling the effort. Now planning is based on the sales forecasts and this eliminated a lot of double entry for each offices, department, business units.
Advanced control of the forecasting: We now run weekly updates with several versions of our forecasts!
Sophistication: We have a great level of details in the analysis, allowing us to perform advanced simulations for planning and decisions.
Standard functions of CRM, SFA or generally sales support systems place emphasis on the management of the sales pipeline data, which is often the freshest and most sensitive business data. For example, PL (profit and loss statement) considers booked revenues, direct costs and indirect costs. Those take time to gather and process. Besides pure financial figures, any KPIs coming from operations also take time to manage, and the subsequent analysis of difference between the initial forecasts, the budgets and the current actual data is very long and difficult. And this is even before starting to talk about having several versions of the forecasts...
By using Adaptive, organizations can centrally manage the data required for predictive management, all in the cloud. You can imagine incorporating actual data and business results, such as accounting data, as well as prospective sales flows and deals negotiation status data... All of this allows to manage budgets and rolling forecasts, and analyses with versions and variances in the cloud.
By linking Salesforce and Adaptive, you can take advantage of the strengths of both systems as well as reduce the effort required for double entries. So it's a win both ways, less overhead and more precision!
(Adaptive integration from inside Salesforce, version control and KPI dashboard sample)
Here are a few comments from Morpho after the system deployment.
“We introduced Adaptive in order to reduce man-hours, and to improve our analysis accuracy, mostly by removing Excel. It is very convenient to capture the outputs from multiple systems. The data can be aggregated and analyzed, and the comparison between versions is easy. It's also easy to customize, so we plan to expand it in the future. "
Morpho Co. Ltd. , Mr. Dojin Takashita in charge of IR
About Morpho
Morpho is an R & D-led company for cutting-edge image processing and AI technologies.
We provide advanced image processing technology as embedded software for many devices insluding smartphones.
We also provide image recognition technology that makes full use of AI and AI inference software "SoftNeuro®" and others, and have a large track record of use in vehicles, surveillance cameras, in structural deterioration diagnosis, and we leverage our know-how to improve accuracy at the operational level. We continue to invest in R&D and innovate in image recognition.
Our website : https://www.morphoinc.com/
What is Workday Adaptive Planning?
Workday Adaptive Planning is a next-generation SaaS cloud system that allows business persons to directly enter budgets, forecasts and manage performance in real time. By integrating automatically data for actuals from existing systems, it is possible to drill down to lowest levels of details as well as aggregating to gain insights. All those data becomes available to build detailed prospective models and simulation, and to centralize information to make faster management decisions.
Adaptive has been recognized as # 1 in Gartner's 2019 user cloud satisfation survey for budgeting systems, as it is extremely easy to use, geared for strategic thinkers, with powerful modeling capabilities, for organizations of all sizes.
Documents and requests : sales@shearwaterplanning.com
Reference links:
https://shearwaterplanning.com/
or
https://www.shearwaterasia.com/adaptive-business-planning-cloud