Adaptive Insights Announces Annual "Torchie" Award Winners

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - May 9, 2016) - Adaptive Insights, the leader in cloud corporate performance management (CPM), has announced the winners of its annual Torchie Awards, recognizing its customers who have achieved excellence in strategic FP&A categories such as operational planning, forecasting, and performance management. The winning customers include California Olive Ranch, Cumulus Media, HireVue, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and ZAGG. Named for the Adaptive Insights logo, the "Flame of Insights," the awards were presented at Adaptive Live 2016, the company's annual global user conference attended by more than 1,400 finance professionals.

"We deeply value our customer relationships and take great pride in enabling their success," said Robert S. Hull, founder and chairman of Adaptive Insights. "That's why it is such a privilege to honor customers who are transforming their organizations through the use of CPM software. These customers have implemented Adaptive Insights' solutions in exactly the way they were intended. They are not only transforming finance but creating fundamentally more agile organizations that can quickly garner insights to make effective, data-driven decisions."

Adaptive Insights proudly presented Torchie Awards to the following customers:

Excellence in Business Partnering and Collaborative Planning: Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

This award recognizes achievement in widespread engagement of business stakeholders and senior executives in the corporate performance management process. To best meet its mission of lifesaving research, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) is committed to the organizational pillars of collaboration, accountability, and transparency. This motived the organization to establish a new focus on financial planning and analysis and seek a solution capable of involving the entire organization in the FP&A process. LLS deployed Adaptive Planning to over 400 managers and employees, representing approximately half of the entire employee base and making corporate performance a central responsibility shared by everyone. Today, Adaptive Planning enables LLS to obtain accurate metrics on business drivers, enhancing decision-making time, and effectiveness. The adoption of monthly reporting tools and real-time collaboration provides new support to LLS's staff, whose main charge is fundraising.

Excellence in Forecasting: California Olive Ranch

This award is for organizations that have improved forecasting accuracy, resulting in significant business impact through cost avoidance, improved profitability, course corrections, and better guidance for all stakeholders. California Olive Ranch, the largest grower and producer of olive oil in the United States, has connected Adaptive Planning with its ERP system, enabling the management team to pull forecasts at any time and see the performance of the company. Cash flow can be analyzed by individual products, channels, and customers. The system has even been extended to include the field sales team in the planning process. As a result, California Olive Ranch has been able to manage supply and optimize its profit margins, establishing a detailed rolling sales forecast that is maintained and updated each month by the sales team, down to the level of each individual stock keeping unit (SKU), unit price, discount, and units sold per customer, per store, and per week. These practices have enabled the company to achieve 40% growth annually--despite having only one olive harvest per year--while staving off global competition and remaining environmentally sustainable.

Excellence in Operational Planning: HireVue

This award is for organizations that are optimizing planning and performance management outside of finance, in functions like manufacturing operations, services, sales, marketing, and IT. HireVue provides innovative job interview video technologies and evaluation tools via a SaaS subscription-based business model to build and coach the world's best teams. In an effort to better forecast revenue, HireVue implemented Adaptive Insights software to create a sophisticated sales planning forecast based on key sales drivers, such as the individual sales person's personal performance, seasonality, territories, and customer target size (SMB or enterprise). The result of this sales planning transformation is a far more accurate and confident sales plan, which feeds right into the revenue forecast. Variances in sales forecasting have been reduced from 20% down to 2%.

Excellence in Planning: ZAGG

ZAGG is a global leader in accessories and technologies that empower mobile lifestyles with a diverse, award-winning portfolio sold under the ZAGG®, mophie®, InvisibleShield®, and iFrogz® brands. As a public company, it is vital for ZAGG to accurately forecast sales projections and keep a watchful eye on profit margins. Prior to implementing Adaptive Insights' software, ZAGG had experienced large forecasting misses related to critical functions including sales and demand planning. Since deploying Adaptive Insights' software, the finance team has instituted a weekly rolling 12-month forecast. The team has also automated reporting and can run ad-hoc analysis on expense and sales forecast variances, Wall Street guidance variances, earnings per share metrics, and profit margins at the SKU and product line levels-all supporting executive decision-making with the ability to spot issues and opportunities sooner as they occur during each quarter.

Excellence in Performance Management: Cumulus Media

This award is for enterprise-wide performance management where the finance function has driven broad performance transformation, fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making and improved collaboration between finance and the business. Cumulus Media is a leader in the radio broadcasting industry, reaching 245 million people each week through 454 owned-and-operated stations across 90 U.S. media markets. Using Adaptive Insights' software, Cumulus was able to automate its budgeting, enable business managers to access their own self-service reports, and move to a weekly rolling forecast model. They have also been able to institute sales modeling, which was previously not possible. Today, Cumulus has much greater visibility into revenue streams, program investments, and advertising program profitability.

About Adaptive Live 2016

This year's Adaptive Live user conference marked the largest gathering of finance and business leaders to-date, attracting 1,400 participants from across the globe, who gathered in Silicon Valley to share strategies, best practices, and valuable insights. The event featured an industry-leading lineup of nearly 100 finance luminaries, keynote speakers, and customer leaders, including guest keynote Ben Saunders, world record-breaking polar explorer and repeat TED speaker. Check out the top highlights and insights from Adaptive Live 2016.

Sponsors at Adaptive Live this year included: Gold sponsors: Armanino, Carlson Management Consulting, Intacct, and KPMG; Silver sponsors: GoPlan, FP&A, Nuage, and Plex; Bronze sponsors: Blackline, Business Solution Partners, IntuitiveTEK, and OPEXEngine.

Adaptive Insights

Adaptive Insights is the leader in cloud corporate performance management (CPM). Via its software as a service (SaaS) platform, the company offers capabilities for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, dashboards, and analytics that empower finance, sales, and other business leaders with insight to drive true competitive advantage. The Adaptive Suite is sold direct or is available through Adaptive Insights' robust cloud CPM channel ecosystem of 200+ partners, including Accenture, Armanino, BDO, Cohn Reznick, Intacct, KPMG, McGladrey, Plex Systems, and Workday. NetSuite also offers Adaptive Planning as its NetSuite Financial Planning Module.

More than 3,000 companies in 85 countries use Adaptive Insights. These range from midsized companies and nonprofits to large corporations, including AAA, Boston Scientific, CORT, Epcor, Konica Minolta, NetSuite, Philips, P.F. Chang's, and Siemens. Adaptive Insights is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. For more information, visit www.AdaptiveInsights.com, the Adaptive Insights Blog, and follow Adaptive Insights on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.