Priestley’s Gourmet Delights brings greater insight to planning with Workday Adaptive Planning

From a station wagon to a sophisticated food business

Priestley’s began with a simple family dream and a station wagon full of cakes, delivering to local cafés and laying the foundations for the business it has become today.

Since then, the family-owned business has steadily grown, moving through a number of locations before opening its purpose-built facility in Acacia Ridge, Brisbane. Today, Priestley’s employs 180 people across Australia and New Zealand, including a smaller New Zealand operation trading as Elite Desserts.

While cakes and desserts are at the heart of the business, the operation around making and selling them has become considerably more sophisticated. Priestley’s has increasingly put technology at the heart of how it operates, with its new purpose-built facility bringing greater automation into production. Modernising financial planning and reporting is another step in that journey.

Production, labour, freight, raw materials, customer demand and seasonality all influence financial performance. At greater volumes, relatively small movements across those variables can become significant.

For CFO Martin Holslag, that makes the ability to understand what is happening across the business and identify changes earlier particularly important.

Choosing technology that fits the business

Priestley’s had relied heavily on Excel for budgeting, forecasting and modelling.

As the business grew, so did the size and complexity of those models. Information was drawn from different sources, comparisons could be difficult and knowledge about how individual spreadsheets worked became concentrated with particular people.

Martin had used Workday Adaptive Planning in a previous role and knew the platform well. That experience didn't make the selection automatic. Priestley’s looked at the market for a solution that could meet its requirements today, while providing room to develop its planning capability over time.

For Martin, the decision came down to finding the right balance.

We wanted something that cost-wise and functionality-wise met and married what we need and what we'll want to be able to do in the future, without overspending and creating unnecessary technical debt.”

It reflects Priestley’s' approach to adopting the right technology where it can add value to the business.

We want to be technology led, but we want to do it in a sustainable, sensible, cost-effective way.”

Building confidence before complexity

Priestley’s took a controlled approach to introducing the platform.

Rather than rushing to extend the value and functionality of Adaptive throughout the organisation, Martin has deliberately kept it finance-led and finance-owned while the team builds its knowledge and confidence in the models.

The priority is to understand how those models work, what they make possible within the budgeting and forecasting process, and where they can continue to be improved.

That represents an important change from the spreadsheet environment. With Excel, finance teams often need to understand and maintain the mechanics of the models they have built. With Adaptive, Martin wants his team to understand the design and logic of the models, but to spend more of their time using them to understand the business.

Fusion5 helped lead Priestley’s through the design and build of its Adaptive environment, bringing together knowledge of the platform, existing financial planning models and the unique dynamics of Priestley’s’ operations.

Just as importantly, Martin wanted that knowledge captured rather than residing with a small number of people.

One of the things Fusion5 has helped us with is making sure we document what our Adaptive instance looks like, so we don't end up with that key-person risk.”

Martin wants his team to build the knowledge and capability to configure and manage Adaptive themselves. As their confidence grows, they can keep extending how they use the platform and the value it delivers.

More insight, earlier

While Priestley’s is deliberately taking a measured approach to extending its use of Adaptive, the finance team is already seeing a significant change in what it can do with its data.

Reporting is much faster, but for Martin the greater value is in the depth and insight Adaptive now provides. Rather than relying on point-in-time reporting and a single static budget or forecast comparison, finance can work with multiple plans, explore different dimensions of performance and model changes on a daily basis if required.

The level of detail available to the team is changing too. Freight, raw materials and direct labour are all important cost drivers for Priestley’s. Adaptive gives the team greater scope to model these individually and understand how movements can flow through budgets and forecasts. Insights can also be easily reviewed and analysed at a customer or regional level.

Sales reporting provides a good example. Cakes don't sell evenly, and demand builds and falls around events such as Easter and Christmas, creating distinct patterns within a month.

Priestley’s can now plan and analyse sales at a daily level, reflecting expected activity on individual trading days rather than spreading a monthly figure evenly across the period. This provides a much more accurate view of how sales are expected to track through the month.

We're trying to understand where our sales fluctuate through the month so we can get a better picture throughout the month as to whether we're going to hit our end-of-month result,” says Martin.

Giving the finance team more room to think

For Martin, another important outcome is what Adaptive enables his finance team to do.

Priestley’s has a small team of bright, inquisitive finance analysts who are getting hands-on with Adaptive, learning how models work, testing ideas and developing the confidence to do more within the platform themselves.

It is the sort of work they want to be doing. It moves the emphasis away from maintaining and manipulating increasingly complicated spreadsheets and towards analysing information, understanding business drivers and thinking about what the numbers are telling them.

Learning was an important part of the Adaptive rollout for Martin. While Workday provides online training material, Martin has found interactive learning particularly valuable for his team. Since going live, they have participated in several Fusion5-led training sessions where they can connect what they are learning directly to the work they are doing.

The team walk out of those sessions going, ‘Oh, I know how to do this now,’” he says.

Building from here

For Priestley’s, there is still plenty of opportunity to build on what is already in place.

The finance team will continue to refine its models, build its capability and extend the reporting and analysis it can do within the platform. But for Martin, the longer-term opportunity reaches beyond finance.

As the quality and level of detail in the information improve, so too does the opportunity to make it more accessible to leaders across the business. Rather than finance holding and interpreting the numbers, managers can increasingly access information relevant to their own areas of operation in forms they can understand and use.

That means giving people greater visibility of the things they can influence, whether that's sales performance, production costs, labour, freight, customers or other operational drivers, and helping them use that information to make better-informed decisions.

There is another important benefit to getting the data foundations right. Moving information away from disparate spreadsheets gives Priestley’s greater control over how important business data is managed, secured and retained.

It also creates stronger foundations for emerging capabilities such as AI and agents as they become part of the platforms the business uses.

Martin sees value on both fronts: making trusted information more accessible to people today, while putting Priestley’s in a stronger position to take advantage of new technology as it develops.

For Martin, that is where the strategic value of the platform starts to emerge. Giving more people access to accurate, granular information doesn't simply change reporting. It can progressively change how people understand, manage and make decisions about the business.