It’s the final week of user acceptance testing for our global Fortune 500 rollout of Workday Adaptive Insights. The goal is to migrate hundreds of business planners who forecast headcount for tens of thousands of positions off of SAP BPC, Oracle Hyperion Essbase, and Microsoft Excel onto one common platform that integrates into Workday.

The project is running on all cylinders, the team is in lock step, the solution works. Green circles across the status deck, and then it happens. Business users ask “the question.”

– Can I use an Excel UI to do my planning, like in SAP BPC, CCH Tagetik, or Hyperion Essbase? Why do I have to use a Web UI? It’s so much slower to update my forecast…

Then they say it—something we’ve been calling attention to for years: “I want Excel.”

It’s amazing that they haven’t asked earlier. What’s the answer? Why can’t they have Excel? Why is the software industry trying to move the business world away from Excel and onto planning applications with a Web UI?

From the outside looking in, the software industry appears out of step with its customers. Can it change the hearts and minds of millions, even tens of millions of business planners?

The first fully web-based planning application that I came into contact with was Anaplan. Back in 2010/2011, I was asked to provide subject matter expertise to a customer who was evaluating business planning tools. The customer’s technology head, who was running the selection, is a true visionary. The EPM platforms being evaluated were Anaplan, IBM Cognos, Hyperion Essbase, and SAP BPC (which was just released after the Outlooksoft acquisition).

Anaplan was so new that its founders, Guy Haddleton and Michael Gould, flew in from the UK to conduct the demo. Michael, who wrote Anaplan in his house in Scotland, did the demo while Guy fielded all of the business questions. In retrospect, I was watching history but didn’t realize it. All I could think was, “There’s no Microsoft Excel UI. This product is DOA.”

While I was definitely wrong about Anaplan’s future, I was right about the staying power of Excel and the resistance users would have to eliminating it from a budgeting/forecasting application.

For decades, software companies (initially ERP/business intelligence providers like SAP, Oracle, and IBM) tried to build fully functional Excel add-ins that let business users plan and report with Microsoft Excel while integrating the data layer into their business intelligence platforms.

The problem that they faced was easy to identify: they only partially worked. Problem number 2: Microsoft kept changing Excel, resulting in a lot of technology production support costs and constant product testing. With the launch of Microsoft 365, where patches are pushed without customer acceptance, the problem of supporting custom add-ins intensified.

In another flashback forward, I remember my first SAP BPS (business planning and simulation) project in 2000. I remember thinking that SAP was genius and had jumped light years ahead of where they were previously and where their competitors were. BPS was SAP’s first real attempt to create an Excel-based planning application. I can remember sitting at dinner with the SAP product developers, Marc Bernard and Kirk Anderson, talking about the future. BPS was followed by IP (~2007) then BPC (~2009) and now SAC (~2018, which is Web UI).

It’s easy to see that companies like Anaplan, CCH Tagetik, and Workday Adaptive Insights saw an unaddressed market. They had a deep understanding of business planning (aka budgeting and forecasting) and built great solutions to address global business planning requirements. They created SaaS platforms that made total cost of ownership (TCO) affordable for almost any size company. And they chose not to fight the Microsoft Excel beast. Gartner has rewarded them by putting them in the leader or visionary quadrants—well deserved.

“Can I use an Excel UI to do my planning?”

The answer is a solid maybe. Depending on the software application you choose, which may be driven by a series of decisions, the answer will vary. Anaplan, Adaptive Insights, and other next-generation tools have averted Excel as the primary planning UI. SAP SAC, IBM Cognos, and Oracle Cloud EPM (also enterprise performance management tools) are migrating away from Excel as the primary planning UI. And products like CCH Tagetik have tried to straddle the line between Excel and the web.

Given that this UI struggle has been at the forefront of planning technologies for the past two decades, this isn’t likely to get resolved quickly. But, that doesn’t mean it’s time to give up hope. On the contrary. It’s time to continue asking yourself the hard questions and pushing for what you need to set your business up for its best future.

Now it’s your time to weigh in on the conversation. If you seek to resolve answers to the above questions, PDG Consulting can help you decide which option works best for your organization. Because we want to accomplish the same goals as you, you can rest assured that your unique business planning needs come first.

We also provide business planning software services that include software customizations for improving planning and forecasting, increasing revenue, and obtaining advanced business intelligence. This way, you can focus on business performance while we take care of the backend.

To learn more, connect with us today.