Winning Big with Workday Adaptive Planning
How a casino gained real-time dashboards, data accessibility, and self-service readiness with a tailored Workday Adaptive Planning solution.
Client
Prairie Band Casino & Resort is a Native American casino in Kansas owned by the Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation. The tribe officially took over operations in 2007 and now has over 1,000 slot machines, a bingo hall, and over 25 table games. Prairie Band Casino is open 24 hours a day and offers food and drinks at each of its three restaurants. In addition to its over 40,000 square feet of gaming space, Prairie Band owns and operates an adjacent hotel with over 350 guest rooms, several meeting rooms, and a gift shop.
Challenge
Prairie Band’s financial planning and analysis (“FP&A”) managers had a tedious, complex budgeting process. The FP&A team met with each department yearly to review trends, expected revenue, and total costs. While that’s a regular financial activity, Prairie Band’s limited technology made it more challenging. Management wanted daily operating reports, so FP&A teams had to take each department’s monthly budget and break it down by day, incorporating patterns and seasonality. Only then could finance and leadership work together to establish a realistic future budget.
This process involved many meetings and produced numerous budget versions; figuring out which file was the source of truth was like finding a needle in a haystack. Most of the time, FP&A managers would create a new budget by cobbling the pieces together, and when any top-down adjustments needed to be made, they had to repeat the entire process. When the team presented the final budget to the Board and Tribal Council, it was time to layer in additional actuals to see rolling trends. Budgeting required at least four to six months, taking valuable time away from the finance and leadership teams.
Approach
From our experience with other casino clients, we knew that Workday Adaptive Planning would be an ideal solution for Prairie Band. It combines data sources to produce real-time insights for the team, internal stakeholders, and the Prairie Band Potawatomi Entertainment Board of Directors.
Enabling Self-Service
One of the first things we did was make budgeting an intradepartmental activity. When equipped with the right data, internal groups could do their own planning without the finance team’s intervention. To do that, we knew Prairie Band leaders needed specific daily metrics, so we created revenue sheets for every department that could be drilled down to a detailed level. With this data accessible, each team could determine things like the typical sales mix over five days or the average revenue for food, beer, liquor, and wine, respectively. These insights contributed to more accurate planning and encouraged collaboration and accountability.
Integrating Workday Adaptive Planning with Accounting Software
Prairie Band had an enterprise data warehouse, but it wasn’t connected to their cloud-based financial management software. When implementing Workday Adaptive Planning, we recommended an integration that would pull fees continuously, giving the Prairie Band finance team actuals in real-time. While general ledger accounts are built to monthly time strata, the FP&A team can easily pull in daily transactions so everyone can view them in Workday Adaptive Planning.
Creating a Single Source of Truth
Another priority for us was eliminating the many versions of Prairie Band’s budgets. Getting everything into one platform with history tracking empowered the finance team to monitor budget updates and ensure they align with global projections. CentralizingSin the budget would also help account for incremental revenues or costs during future expansions—something Prairie Band struggled with during the middle of the pandemic.
Results
Today, any Prairie Band user with access to Workday Adaptive Planning can reference what’s happening in any area of the business, from gaming and HR to marketing and hospitality. Giving everyone a comprehensive view of their department has also empowered internal stakeholders to devise their own forecasts and stick to their goals.
Enhanced Reporting Capabilities
In Prairie Band’s Workday Adaptive Planning environment, each department has a revenue sheet designed with its reporting needs in mind. Users can switch between daily, monthly, and quarterly views and see how their budgets link to the overall company income statement. The finance team also sends everyone a daily flash report to see how their performance is trending and warns them of any obstacles to hitting their numbers so they can make changes accordingly.
With [Workday] Adaptive, we now send a daily flash report to everybody, from our tribal council to our board, to our gaming commission, to all of the execs and hiring managers. They can go in at any point, look at the data on the whole, and drill down to look at trends themselves.
Reduced Budgeting Time
Instead of wasting four to six months drowning in Excel, Prairie Band’s finance team can leave the planning up to individual departments. When it’s time to prepare budgets, finance tweaks what departments already have and sends it for approval. We also made it easier for department heads to make changes to their budgets, giving them shortcuts for interpreting historical actuals data or seeing how things like inflation might affect their budgets for next year.
Today, departmental leaders can see on a daily/weekly basis what their actuals were, and then they can then forecast or budget for what they planned to see going forward.
A Holistic View of Data
Workday Adaptive Planning’s workflows and process trackers paint a real-time picture of Prairie Band’s business. Now, the finance team automatically sends a daily flash report to the Tribal Council, Board, Gaming Commission, and hiring managers so everyone is on the same page. The leadership team finds these dashboards especially helpful in knowing where to focus their efforts with executives.
Prairie Band Casino’s finance team continues to derive value from their Workday Adaptive Planning solution, allowing them to win big, even in times of significant change.
Getting a single source of truth, providing self-service, and having the ability to pivot and run scenarios was huge for us.
Workday Adaptive Planning