FarmRight breaks new planning ground to achieve scalable growth.

In its first 2 decades, agricultural investor FarmRight expanded from 3 managed dairy farms to 59 properties in New Zealand, diversifying into beef, orchards, vineyards, and hops gardens. With each new property and different commodity type, planning and forecasting became more onerous. 

“We had a detailed Microsoft Excel model for every farm we managed,” says Chief Financial Officer Mark Paul. “Once we got into a growth phase, collating all those spreadsheets became a bit of a nightmare. It was really time-consuming for our investment managers and nonscalable. We needed a solution that enabled us to roll out planning and budgeting in a standardised manner and collate everything efficiently into a consolidated budgeting report.”

FarmRight chose Workday Adaptive Planning for its ability to build bespoke formulas and workpapers, drill into budget transaction detail, and easily generate new scenarios.

True scalability.

Previously, when FarmRight acquired new farms, the resources that needed to be put on grew in a linear fashion. “What you don’t want is a graph that says: ‘Three more farms mean one more staff member,’” explains Paul. 

With 10 days cut from the budgeting process, forecasts being produced in half the time, and collation automated, finance has avoided adding more headcount even though FarmRight has continued to grow at pace. Just as importantly, the percentage of time the team spends on strategic work has tripled.

Robust IRR analysis.

The FarmRight finance team is using its new planning tool to improve investment decision rigor. “When we’re considering a new business, we’ll work out and present the 10-year investment case in Workday Adaptive Planning to demonstrate that the property meets our internal rate of return (IRR) hurdles,” explains Paul. “The beauty of building it in Workday is that you can standardise a lot of your key assumptions.” Whereas when an investment case was put together in a spreadsheet, people could change assumptions to suit the case they were trying to build. 

Finance can also quickly understand which properties are not meeting the hurdle IRR and need to be put on a watch list for improvement or sale. “We’re making important business decisions based on the information coming out of Workday, and our reaction times are a lot faster,” notes Paul.

No surprises.

For Finance Systems Analyst Michael Campion, another benefit of Workday Adaptive Planning is the ability to easily compare the performance of similar properties. Previously, comparative data wouldn’t surface until the later stages of an annual cycle—and then could only be manually extracted from half a dozen spreadsheets. 

“Now, if our investment manager is working across all the Canterbury protein farms, they can compare farms on the fly and provide real-time feedback,” Campion explains. “It also helps us build better relationships with our investment clients as no one likes surprises.”

Campion says the team can also build multidimensional models for horticulture properties, including critical details like the age of plants and the varietals on different blocks. “It allows us to reflect on what varietals are profitable. If certain varietals or certain areas on the property are not reaching our targets, then we can check and adjust that early on in the piece.”