HispanicBusiness

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 02/13/13 -- Adaptive Planning, the worldwide leader in cloud-based corporate performance management (CPM) solutions for companies and nonprofits of all sizes, today announced that Knowledge Universe®, a global education leader, has done away with cumbersome Excel-based budgeting and instead implemented Adaptive Planning at its Singapore headquarters, as well as its operations in other countries around the world, allowing more than 300 users to benefit from vastly improved planning, forecasting and reporting processes.

Knowledge Universe® operates more than 3,000 education centers and schools across the globe, and employs over 30,000 educators and education professionals. The finance team faced significant challenges and complexity managing the budget process across this vast network. They relied on spreadsheets to collect budget data and then had to consolidate hundreds of spreadsheets into a single view. This process was very time consuming and it was difficult to get visibility into key business drivers quickly.

"After implementing an Oracle solution in our Singapore business, we decided the investment needed for a wider roll-out was cost prohibitive," recalls Reg Singh, global CFO at Knowledge Universe®. "We now use NetSuite's OneWorld platform for accounting and CRM and learned about its integration with Adaptive Planning. Adaptive Planning stood out for its ease of use and strong forecasting and reporting capabilities. In addition, the ease with which non-finance users are able to utilise the tool was a critical element in our decision to select Adaptive Planning. Furthermore, it reduced the time spent managing very large volumes spreadsheets and allowed us to more effectively manage our global business."

After successfully implementing Adaptive Planning in Singapore in 2010 for the 2011 budget, Knowledge Universe® extended the solution initially across Malaysia, India and the United Kingdom over the course of 2011 and 2012. Today, the company has more than 300 users of Adaptive Planning. They rely on the solution for budgeting, personnel planning and revenue planning, which is driven by student enrollment and programme pricing. They also conduct monthly forecasting across all of their education centers. Recently, they added Adaptive Discovery, the visual discovery application within the Adaptive Planning suite of performance management solutions, which provides dashboards and scorecards for financial and non-financial data.

"The real value of Adaptive Planning is not only the automation aspect, but that it provides a much richer budgeting environment, with which we can think through our strategy, better understand assumptions while delivering a more thought-driven budget to the organization," said Singh. "Adaptive Planning is much more than just a planning tool and enables us to deliver management reporting across the organization."