Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM vs. Workday Adaptive Planning
Businesses around the world look to their finance teams to provide guidance about where to invest and grow–especially in times of uncertainty. Only Oracle provides a full suite of cloud-based enterprise performance management applications to help you analyze, understand, and report on your financial position. Compare Workday Adaptive Planning to Oracle Cloud EPM and see why Oracle is the better choice for you.
Business advantages |
Workday Adaptive Planning |
Oracle Cloud EPM |
Why this matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| One complete, unified, and complete cloud EPM application suite | Limited footprint that’s planning centric. May require custom development or third-party partner tools for other non-planning EPM business processes.1 | Includes solutions for planning, profitability and cost management, financial consolidation and close, account reconciliation, tax reporting, narrative reporting, freeform, and enterprise data management. | A complete solution integrates management processes across the organization, aligning strategy with execution. Provides improved visibility and insight into all aspects of the business.2 |
| Planning, budgeting, and forecasting | Standard capabilities for financial planning (FP&A). | Purpose-built with comprehensive and innovative capabilities integrated across finance, operations, and lines of business. | Enables you to make better decisions with goal-oriented, driver-based plans. Gain immediate insights into performance and best path forward recommendations with predictive planning.3 |
| Integrated business planning and execution (IBPX) | Fewer out-of-the-box capabilities mean that additional application development may be required.4 | Provides end-to-end planning capabilities for manufacturing companies, enabling them to achieve their long-, medium-, and short-term performance goals.5 | Transform plans into execution and monitor activity to detect unexpected events using the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, and prescriptive analytics. Simulate and evaluate alternative responses to maintain or improve business targets.6 |
| Profitability and cost management | No known native profitability and cost management application. May rely on custom partner applications.7 | Purpose-built profitability and cost management applications are included in Oracle Cloud EPM. | You can allocate resources more effectively with a deeper understanding of costs and profitability.8 |
| Connected enterprise planning | Fewer out-of-the-box capabilities mean that additional application development may be required.9 | Purpose-built finance and line-of-business applications, including sales, workforce, supply chain, and integrated business planning and execution.10 | Gain planning alignment and accuracy by leveraging built-in best practice capabilities across finance, operations, and line of business.11 |
| Connected financial consolidation and close | No known native offering.12 | Purpose-built consolidation and close applications are included in Oracle Cloud EPM. | Enables you to efficiently manage the consolidation and close, end to end. Helps ensure processes are dependable, correct, timely, transparent, streamlined, efficient, compliant, and auditable.13 |
| Account reconciliation | No known native offering.14 | A purpose-built account reconciliation application is included in Oracle Cloud EPM. | Helps you close faster by automating account reconciliations and transaction matching. Improve the efficiency and accuracy of your financial statements while addressing security and risk typically associated with the process.15 |
| Comprehensive tax reporting | No known native offering.16 | A purpose-built tax application is included in Oracle Cloud EPM. | Align tax with corporate financial reporting for better visibility and compliance. Deliver transparent corporate tax processes—including tax provision and country-by-country reporting (CbCR).17 |
| Narrative reporting | No known native offering.18 | Purpose-built narrative reporting is included in Oracle Cloud EPM. | Helps you meet internal and external reporting needs. Collaborate across the report creation process to define, author, review, and publish management and regulatory reports.19 |
| Enterprise data management | No known native offering.20 | Purpose-built and part of the Oracle Cloud EPM platform. However, enterprise data management is not limited to the EPM environment. | Respond and adapt to change faster by accelerating digital transformations, modeling potential M&A, chart of accounts redesign, and more. Pull or push enterprise data (e.g., master data, reference data, and hierarchies) to and from various systems, such as ERP, EPM, HCM, and data warehouses, whether they are cloud, on-premises, Oracle, or non-Oracle.21 |
| Next-generation technologies | |||
| Comprehensive Microsoft Office integration (Oracle Smart View for Office) | Partial capabilities.22 | Extensive Microsoft Office integration and comprehensive functionality provided by Oracle Smart View for Office.23 | Integrate ERP, EPM, and business intelligence data into Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. View, import, manipulate, distribute, and share data in Office-based interfaces.24 |
| Data integration | Limited, data import/export and API toolkit.25 | World-class integration platform and services. | Easily integrate your critical sources into your Oracle Cloud EPM application, regardless of whether the source is on-premises, in the cloud, Oracle, or third party.26 |
| Advanced analytics and BI | Limited capabilities.27 | Available in the industry-leading Oracle Analytics Cloud platform. | Oracle Analytics empowers business users, data engineers, and data scientists to access and process relevant data, evaluate predictions, and make quick, accurate decisions. |
| Embedded AI and machine learning | Recent announcements of early stages of AI and ML capabilities.28 | Native, comprehensive AI and ML infrastructure embedded in Oracle Cloud EPM Intelligent Performance Management Insights. | Empowers finance to become data-driven, speed up data analysis to take faster action with Insights, and improve decisions with predictive planning. |
| Digital assistants (Chatbots) | No known native capabilities. | Oracle Cloud EPM features an embedded, AI-guided digital assistant. | Helps teams work better and faster with instant responses, recommendations, and updates on critical tasks.29 |
| Cloud platform technology provider | May use third-party cloud hosting providers.30 | Natively managed by Oracle on Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure. | Oracle Cloud EPM is fully developed and managed by Oracle delivering best-in-class, security, scheduled updates, and uptime reliability. |
Sources
1 Planning centric. No nonplanning EPM applications. https://www.workday.com/en-us/products/adaptive-planning/overview.html
2 https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/applications/epm/oracle-epm-suite-solution-brief.pdf
3 https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/planning/
4 Lacks integrated IOT/AI/prescriptive analytics and execution. https://www.adaptiveplanning.com/solutions/manufacturing
https://www.adaptiveplanning.com/sites/default/files/assets/workday-adaptive-planning-datasheet-for-manufacturing.pdf
5 https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/cfo-epm-planning-infographic-five-reasons.pdf
6 https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/planning/#rc30p7
7 No known native profitability and cost management solution. May rely on partners. https://miagen.com/technology/workday-adaptive-planning/workday-adaptive-planning/profitability-analysis/
8 https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/profitability-cost-management/
9 Gartner, “Market Guide for Cloud Extended Planning and Analysis Solutions,” 9 July 2022, ID G00765782.
10 https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/cfo-epm-planning-infographic-five-reasons.pdf
11 https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/applications/epm/oracle-epm-suite-solution-brief.pdf
12 There is no known or advertised native offering from Workday Adaptive Planning. The software relies on Workday Financial Management for consolidations.
https://www.workday.com/en-us/products/financial-management/close-consolidate.html
13 https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/applications/epm/oracle-financial-consolidation-and-close-ds.pdf
14 No public data on a purpose-built AR solution. Their internal blog points to BlackLine as their partner for close and AR solutions with their customers.
https://blog.adaptiveplanning.com/customer-success/roi-netsuite-adaptive-insights-blackline/
15 https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/account-reconciliation/
16 No published reference to a purpose-built tax reporting/provisioning solution.
https://www.adaptiveplanning.com/cpm-solutions-by-need
17 https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/tax-reporting/
18 No purpose-built narrative reporting module. Partners with Workiva and uses Microsoft Office to build custom external narrative reports via its Office Connect utility.
https://marketplace.workiva.com/en-us/connectors/workday-adaptive-planning-connector
https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/datasheets/enus-pln-da-workday-adaptive-planning-officeconnect.pdf
19 https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/narrative-reporting/
20 Partners with Qmetrix, Informatica, but has no native solution such as Oracle Enterprise Data Management.
https://qmetrix.com.au/technology/profisee/
https://marketplace.informatica.com/listings/cloud/connectors/Infometry_Adaptive_Insights_Connector.html
21 https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/applications/epm/oracle-enterprise-data-mgmt-cloud-ds.pdf
22 Has a connecter called “OfficeConnect,” which provides basic Microsoft Office connectivity for data import/export to create Office-based visualizations and extended reports. There does not appear to be any comparable out-of-the-box features like those offered by Oracle Smart View, such as EPM and ERP integration, comprehensive ad hoc, free-form capabilities, or precreated content.
https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/datasheets/enus-pln-da-workday-adaptive-planning-officeconnect.pdf
https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/smart-view-for-office/
23 https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/platform/
24 https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/smart-view-for-office/
25 Standard ETL/bulk and developer APIs. No native integration to Oracle Applications. No public data on any drill though to source ERP and other transaction systems, such as Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud HCM.
26 https://www.oracle.com/performance-management/platform/#rc30p3
27 Doesn’t have the breadth and depth of Oracle Analytics offerings, such as prebuilt analytics spanning ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX. They have a reporting/analytics platform specific to their planning platform.
https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/datasheets/enus-pln-da-workday-adaptive-planning-reporting-analytics.pdf
28 https://diginomica.com/workdays-aneel-bhusri-ai-can-deliver-its-possibilities-needs-be-regulated
29 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk4L_UVXD54
30 Uses Google, AWS, and Dimension Data for IaaS as well as Cyxtera for safeguard controls.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/google-cloud-and-workday-announce-multi-year-strategic-partnership-to-digitally-transform-enterprises-around-the-world-301351721.htmlhttps://www.theregister.com/2021/08/12/workday_google_preferred_partner/
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