Rubrik, a global provider of cloud-based data management and protection solutions, is growing fast: skyrocketing to 1,500 employees in four years. The company had deployed Workday Human Capital Management to enhance the employee experience, offer greater organisational visibility to executives, and ease HR’s burden of providing employee services and reporting.
Before Workday, however, manual planning was impeding organisational agility – essential to its success. The company was still doing strategic planning via spreadsheets, resulting in fragmented data and shortcomings in collaboration that undercut its ability to actively plan or manage expansion.
Initially, Rubrik deployed Workday Adaptive Planning only for financial planning. But, after it helped reduce quarterly closings from three months to just seven days, Rubrik expanded the deployment of Workday Adaptive Planning to manage data across workforce, sales and demand planning.
Doing so unlocked opportunities for cross-functional collaboration and performance improvements. With a new planning foundation using consistent, real-time data, Rubrik sought to accelerate planning processes even further by developing third-party integrations with Workday Adaptive Planning.
This enabled greater planning automation across finance, operations, sales, demand, workforce and IT. Now, Rubrik teams produce a full balance sheet and income statement with data continuously flowing in quarter over quarter, ensuring the once-sporadic Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) are held consistently. Planning has become more efficient and accurate and has met the CFO’s demand for three-day closings.
With renewed agility and visibility across the entire organisation, Rubrik can be more responsive to market trends and make faster decisions supported by up-to-the-minute management reporting and personalised analytics.
Challenges.
Invalid data hindered decision-making.
Without trust in the data used for periodic financial reporting and the annual operating plan, leadership did not feel confident making critical decisions or reporting to the board.
Spreadsheets inhibited workforce planning.
With the rapid rate of growth and personnel being one of the biggest expenses for a software company, Rubrik needed more accurate and efficient ways than spreadsheets to track growth and plan for workforce expenses in real time.
Difficult to determine territories.
The process of taking a large, multidimensional data set and cutting it numerous different ways to finally get down to territories was too difficult and too hard to visualise using spreadsheets.
Lack of data integrity limited inventory visibility.
Rubrik’s demand planning and cost management of third-party hardware shipments were compromised by version control challenges from inaccurate spreadsheets, making it impossible to confirm the size of these losses.
I think implementing Workday Adaptive Planning has been a significant step forward for our company. To automate planning in a comprehensive manner across the company is setting the foundation for growth.
Vice President of IT Business Applications
Results.
Live data automation unlocks organisational agility.
With Workday providing secure anytime, anywhere access to real-time data, Rubrik plans companywide with collaboration across multiple teams from finance to product operations. As a result, the quarterly reporting process has become much more efficient and accurate, allowing the finance team to hold consistent QBRs and meet the CFO’s demand for a three-day close.
Data visualisation aligns workforce requirements to growth.
By putting all workforce expense planning in one place with Workday, Rubrik can plan and forecast by headcount and to-be-hired, including travel and expenses, bonus and fringe calculations, and merit increases based on expansion needs. Detailed reporting allows Rubrik to have more extensive insights into spending by cost centre, account and even facility allocation.
Intuitive territory design.
With the visual layout of data in the Workday Adaptive Planning dashboard, what was once a jumble of regions in a spreadsheet becomes clear to see in a heatmap-style GeoMap for territory visualisation along geo hierarchies down to the postcode level and slice and dice based on additional attributes such as TAM (total addressable market of a territory). The ability to do “what if” analysis allows sales operations to move accounts around in different territories and immediately see the impact.
Highly visible demand planning reduces inventory costs.
Inventory levels and costs are now monitored by the operations team in real time while monthly, quarterly and annual forecasts for demand and inventory planning enhance executive decision support.