LONDON--(Marketwire - August 10, 2009) - Adaptive Planning, the worldwide leader in on-demand financial planning and reporting solutions for companies of all sizes, today announced that the Specsavers Group has selected Adaptive Planning software to optimize its budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes. As the UK's leading glasses provider, Specsavers is using Adaptive Planning to dramatically improve the efficiency of its budgeting and forecasting processes, enhance collaboration, and establish a financial planning platform to support aggressive expansion. With this significant multi-year agreement, which supports business users worldwide and includes joint product development activities, Specsavers has become Adaptive Planning's largest European customer.

With over 1370 retail locations in ten countries and a robust customer website, Specsavers is the UK's leading retailer of glasses, contact lenses, and digital hearing aids. As its business has rapidly expanded throughout the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Specsavers needed a more sophisticated and comprehensive solution that would eliminate the pain and resources associated with an international planning process. Given the dynamics of a growing company and an increasingly volatile economic climate, the company sought a solution that also allowed them to perform more collaborative rolling forecasts. The company's previous spreadsheet-based processes took too long, were inaccurate, and resulted in significant consolidation and version control challenges. Executives and managers needed a better foundation for driving an international expansion.

"Our goals for a new budgeting and planning solution were to reduce the amount of time required for budgeting, implement a rolling forecast process, simplify the collection process across globally distributed groups, and eliminate the considerable pains created by our proliferating spreadsheets," said Andrew Mackay, Director of Reporting for Specsavers. "Our IT department identified Adaptive Planning as an application that offered advanced budgeting, planning and reporting capabilities. After evaluating the product, we quickly realized that Adaptive Planning would be an ideal solution for evolving our key financial processes."

Specsavers evaluated a number of budgeting and forecasting applications before selecting Adaptive Planning. Specsavers' IT group selected Adaptive Planning's open-source solution because it was consistent with their strategy to employ applications that offer greater development flexibility and integration with other mission-critical systems. The company's finance organisation selected the solution for its ease of use, powerful business process features, and price point that was significantly lower than competitive solutions.

"Prior to implementing the Adaptive Planning solution, we were heavily reliant on Excel for our budgeting and forecasting," said MacKay. "We had to email spreadsheets to contributors across 10 international locations and collect the data. As a result, it was an extremely time intensive, error-prone and inflexible process that typically took us up to 4 months. As we focused on global expansion, we knew there had to be a better process."

With Adaptive Planning, Specsavers has been able to decrease budgeting times and improve overall accuracy, and they will be able to enhance their ability to plan for the future by implementing rolling forecasts. More importantly, they have established a collaborative financial management platform that will help drive better, more strategic business decisions going forward.

Adaptive Planning provides powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use software without the exorbitant costs or lengthy installations associated with enterprise performance management packages. The solution is available both as an on-demand service and as an on-premise application; deployments average less than 3 weeks of consulting time; and business users require under an hour of training. The company has over 450 customers worldwide.

About Adaptive Planning

Adaptive Planning is the worldwide leader in on-demand planning and reporting solutions that streamline financial processes, strengthen collaboration, and drive better-informed, more strategic business decisions in companies of all sizes. Adaptive Planning makes it easy to move beyond spreadsheets and automate budgeting, forecasting, and reporting, without the cost and complexity associated with traditional business intelligence and BPM software. With free software, free trials, and both on-demand and on-premise deployment options, Adaptive Planning provides the fastest and easiest approach to streamline and elevate your financial management. Adaptive Planning is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. and can be reached at 650-528-7500 or www.adaptiveplanning.com.

Contact Information: Media Contacts: Derek Kober GlobalFluency 650.433.4233 Greg Schneider Adaptive Planning 650.810.0525