Strengthening commercial insight with Workday Adaptive Planning, implemented by GK Horizons
Case Study Snapshot
| Organisation | Real Pet Food Company |
| Sector | Manufacturing / FMCG |
| Planning Platform | Workday Adaptive Planning |
| GK Horizons Role | Solution Redesign, Three-Way Planning, Commercial Modelling, Decision Architecture |
| Planning Focus | Revenue, Margin, SKU & Customer Profitability, Three-Way Planning, Scenario Modelling |
| Key Outcomes | Faster Scenario Turnaround, Reduced FP&A Workload, Improved Board-Level Confidence, Scalable Commercial Insight |
| Decision Context | Supporting SKU and Customer-level Commercial Decisions at scale while maintaining Board Confidence and Financial Governance across a growing FMCG footprint |
About Real Pet Food Company
Real Pet Food Company is an Australian-based, multi-brand FMCG manufacturer operating across domestic and international markets, with a complex commercial footprint spanning customers, channels, manufacturing sites, brands, and geographies.
As the business continued to scale, the focus was not simply on adding more reporting, but on ensuring the organisation could continue to plan and make decisions with confidence as complexity increased. The finance function sought to strengthen a single, trusted commercial view to support executive and board-level decision-making in a consistent, scalable way.
Why Choose Workday Adaptive Planning
At Real Pet Food Company, commercial decisions are made at the intersection of SKU performance, customer profitability, trade investment, and manufacturing cost structures. The planning environment needed to reflect this reality – not just simplify it.
Real Pet Food Company operates in an environment where commercial decisions are shaped by high dimensionality: thousands of SKUs, thousands of customers, trade spend, manufacturing costs, demand assumptions, and multiple market dynamics.
Workday Adaptive Planning had already been implemented and was initially focused on profit and loss reporting. As the organisation’s planning maturity increased, there was an opportunity to extend its use across balance sheet, cash flow, forecasting, budgeting, and scenario modelling. As a result, the business needed a planning platform that could:
- Absorb commercial complexity without becoming fragile
- Support true three-way planning across P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow
- Allow fast, practical scenario modelling at SKU and customer level
- Provide a governed, single source of truth for executive and board decisions
“We needed a planning platform that could handle the level of complexity in our business without becoming fragile. The planning sheets made sense to the team, which meant we could focus on improving decisions rather than managing the tool.”
Jonathan Peters (JP), CFO, Real Pet Food Company
Workday Adaptive Planning provided the right balance of structure and flexibility, enabling high-dimensional modelling while remaining intuitive and usable for the finance and commercial teams who rely on it day to day.
Why Work with GK Horizons
Jonathan Peters (JP), CFO of Real Pet Food Company, re-engaged GK Horizons based on an existing working relationship and a shared understanding of how the business plans, operates, and makes commercial decisions.
Rather than running a formal partner review, the focus was on continuity and confidence, ensuring the platform would be realigned with the original intent: supporting better decisions, not just better reports.
“We didn’t feel the need to run a formal partner review. We already trusted GK Horizons and knew they understood both the platform and how we operate as a business.”
– JP
GK Horizons worked closely with the finance and commercial teams to redesign the planning environment around decision-making, not just system structure. This included:
- Re-establishing Workday Adaptive Planning as the core planning engine
- Introducing full three-way planning across financial statements
- Simplifying and governing assumptions to improve usability
- Aligning operational demand inputs with planning and forecasting horizons
The result was a planning model designed to reflect how Real Pet Food Company actually runs the business, not just how data is stored.
How Real Pet Food Company Uses Workday Adaptive Planning to Govern Commercial Decisions at Scale
Workday Adaptive Planning now underpins Real Pet Food Company’s commercial and financial planning processes, acting as the single, governed environment for performance management and scenario analysis.
The platform supports integrated profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow planning, ensuring commercial decisions are reflected holistically across the business.
Key Decision Capabilities
Commercial finance and FP&A use Workday Adaptive Planning to:
- Model scenarios at SKU and customer level across revenue, COGS, trade spend, margin, and demand assumptions
- Allocate indirect costs back to individual SKUs to understand true SKU-level profitability
- Report monthly, quarterly, and annual performance across brand, customer, and company views
- Compare budget and forecast against actuals by cost centre, brand, and customer
“Most of the time, if we want to change an assumption or test a scenario, we can turn it around within a day. That’s a big shift from where we were before.”
– JP
This capability enables the finance team to respond to executive and board questions with timely, accurate insight — without rebuilding models or reconciling spreadsheets.
What Real Pet Food Company Has Gained
The shift to Workday Adaptive Planning has fundamentally changed how Real Pet Food Company plans and supports commercial decisions.
“Workday Adaptive Planning has allowed us to absorb significantly more complexity without adding headcount. Scenario changes that previously took days can now be turned around within 24 hours, and in some cases much faster. That speed has materially changed how we support decisions at an executive and board level.”
– JP
Decision-Led Outcomes
- Reduced FP&A workload – delaying the need for additional headcount while maintaining capability
- Faster scenario turnaround – moving from multi-day cycles to same-day or next-day updates
- Improved decision quality – clearer, faster responses to executive and board-level challenges
- Greater confidence in numbers – a single, governed planning model
- Scalable foundation – supporting growth across brands, markets, and regions
The finance team now spends less time maintaining models and more time partnering with the business on forward-looking decisions.
Where to Next
Real Pet Food Company continues to evolve its use of Workday Adaptive Planning as the business grows in scale and complexity.
The focus is on ensuring the planning model remains usable and decision-focused, even as new brands, markets, and commercial drivers are introduced.
“Our focus now is on continuing to simplify planning as the business grows, making sure the model keeps pace with complexity without becoming harder to use.”
Jonathan Peters, CFO, Real Pet Food Company
Future priorities include expanding scenario capability across additional commercial drivers, further integrating operational and financial views, and enhancing self-service insight for senior stakeholders and strengthening executive decision confidence as complexity grows.
With a strong planning foundation in place, Real Pet Food Company is well positioned to continue making planning-led decisions as the business evolves, balancing growth, quality, and long-term value.
