Streamlining finance: How regional start-up unifies data to speed up budgeting decisions

Corporate budgeting for the new financial year used to be a frustrating process for Ms Justina Sim. As Singapore's country head for logistics start-up Ninja Van, it was an essential – but painful – annual exercise.

Prior to her current role, Ms Sim was the regional head of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) for Ninja Van Group. Her team was tasked with manually entering vast amounts of financial data into spreadsheets, a time-consuming process that often led to errors.

This problem worsened in recent years as the company rapidly scaled.

It became clear that an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) tool would help with complex, multi-dimensional planning and analysis. It will also empower Ms Sim’s team to move the business forward. 

Ninja Van is not alone in this struggle. In fact, more businesses are replacing their spreadsheet-based approach with an EPM software to monitor, measure and adjust performance across all their business units.

To meet these needs, Ninja Van turned to Workday Adaptive Planning, a cloud-based EPM platform that enables human resource (HR) and finance teams to seamlessly share data and collaborate. Workday Adaptive Planning enables companies of all sizes to become more flexible and responsive to keep pace with today’s ever-evolving business environment. 

This becomes especially beneficial as companies scale and expand into regional markets. At that size, headquarters now need to consolidate financial plans and data across departments and communicate among diverse teams.

This complexity requires robust systems to maintain accurate and efficient financial management, says Mr Vince Randall, vice-president of adaptive planning, APAC at Workday.

For organisations to make more informed budgeting decisions, they need a full financial picture of their business. However, this is difficult when important data is fragmented across various spreadsheets and siloed IT systems. 

Ninja Van faced this hurdle as they expanded across the region. Ms Sim’s team struggled to get a uniform view of the business’ financial health, amid the array of methods regional teams used to plan budgets and forecasts. 

“Aggregating, reconciling and reporting on data became time-consuming and prone to error. This limits the depth of the analysis the FP&A team could perform,” says Ms Sim.

“In addition, having the information in the right format is crucial. When you’re trying to do regional consolidation, you require a certain template.”

With Workday Adaptive Planning, companies can standardise how they gather financial data from multiple sources and regions. It aggregates all the company’s data in a centralised repository, providing a single source for the most updated and accurate information necessary for FP&A employees to rely on for budgeting and forecasting.

Ms Sim notes that using Workday’s EPM software has significantly enhanced Ninja Van’s budgeting process across multiple markets.

It allows Ninja Van's regional FP&A team to set up various worksheets, resulting in better budget control. Moreover, it is now easier for them to facilitate the expansion of new business ventures, such as business-to-business restocking and cold chain delivery services. 

Since deploying Workday Adaptive Planning in 2022, Ninja Van has halved report preparation time. Instead of spending hours double-checking formulas and data, teams can complete reports faster and with greater accuracy. 

Before adopting EPMs, companies that use legacy systems struggled with traceability. This was often due to inadequate collaboration between teams, which subsequently led to poor decision-making.

For example, Ninja Van operates in six markets, with up to 16 departments involved in planning. With so many collaborators, it was always a challenge for Ms Sim to have a clear overview of the planning process and to consolidate the company’s budget.

The root of the problem is the various data modelling tools, such as spreadsheets used across departments. This leads to inconsistent planning assumptions and duplicated, disconnected data.

For instance, HR and finance teams might do their own forecasting without a unified view or input from one another, resulting in significant discrepancies when consolidating data for corporate planning.

“When information is fragmented and inaccessible, it hinders collaboration, swift decision-making and the organisation’s ability to innovate,” says Mr Randall.

Workday Adaptive Planning was designed to allow different teams to connect their data seamlessly. 

At Ninja Van, Ms Sim’s FP&A team works with the operations team to integrate data from their sorting facility. This enables them to analyse the performance of each hub, identify underperformers and address inefficiencies. 

Despite the importance of digital transformation, finance teams struggle with adopting new technologies due to complex interfaces and steep learning curves. Workday Adaptive Planning addresses these pain points with its user-friendly design that does not require specialists to operate.

“The learning curve for the user is not that steep,” says Ms Sim. “Reports can be generated using drag-and-drop functions, and tweaking back-end models doesn’t require complex programming languages or writing formulas.”

The EPM software also seamlessly integrates budgets and forecasts with actual financial numbers, eliminating the need for employees to manually transfer data to a spreadsheet for comparisons.

In addition, employees can further choose to set up automated reports, which can then be shared with various stakeholders. 

As businesses like Ninja Van continue to scale and navigate complex financial landscapes, embracing tools like Workday Adaptive Planning is not just a strategic advantage – it is essential, says Mr Randall. 

“By streamlining financial processes and enhancing collaboration, companies can unlock deeper insights, make more informed decisions, and ultimately drive sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive market,” he adds. 

Find out more about how Workday Adaptive Planning can help your business.