Streamlining Processes Frees Up 36 Days Annually for Deeper Analysis
The A10 finance team has used the Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud to cut three days off of their workload each month – one by automating daily key performance indicator (KPI) analysis and reporting, and another day accelerating the company’s monthly financial close cycle.
That third day of savings came when the team implemented a connector between their Oracle ERP system and Adaptive Insights for revenue modeling. The connector automatically inputs bookings, shipments, and gross margin data into the team’s financial models within Adaptive Insights. It’s a technology upgrade that made three very impactful improvements:
• Heavily reduce data entry errors
• Elimination of time-consuming tasks involving extracting and consolidating data
• A single version of the truth for performance against financial metrics for employees worldwide
"With Adaptive Insights, we’re able to create much more accurate financial forecasts by employing real time data analysis on key business trends, and then ascertain what those trends mean for our business," said A10 Networks Director of FP&A Zoby Shaikh, explaining how the finance team is accelerating performance management. "As a result, we have much better visibility into what these trends depict regarding our prior assumptions, and thus how we should revise these assumptions versus what we planned. Our daily gross margin tracking allows us to optimally structure transactions throughout the quarter."
In addition to tracking bookings, shipments, and backlog data, A10 Networks deployed Adaptive Insights at all of its worldwide locations to accelerate a wide range of processes, including:
• Monthly financial reporting cycles
• Personnel planning
• OPEX forecasting
• Annual planning, and budgeting
Dashboards for Everyone
When the finance team incorporated Adaptive Insights’ visual analytics dashboards, Shaikh was able to lead an entire organizational shift to a more data-driven culture that enforced close and regular monitoring of key business drivers against financial performance goals.
"We need to understand where bookings and gross margins are trending early in the quarter," said Shaikh. "Adaptive Insights enables us to easily analyze these critical daily metrics, and share that analysis with internal decision-makers so that they can course-correct anything that’s trending off target."
The A10 team will integrate data from multiple sources such as Oracle, Salesforce.com, Marketo, and Workday next to provide a centralized view of all key performance indicators specific to managers in Sales, Marketing, and HR, in addition to the entire executive team. "Adaptive Insights is fast becoming our one-stop shop for all metrics across our business," said Shaikh.
