Driver-based planning across manufacturing operations with Workday Adaptive Planning, implemented by GK Horizons.
Case Study Snapshot
| Organisation | Sanitarium Health Food Co. (Sanitarium) |
| Sector | Food Manufacturing / FMCG |
| Operations | Multi-site Manufacturing across Australia and New Zealand |
| Planning Focus | Driver-Based Forecasting, Financial Planning and Profitability Insights |
| Key Systems | ERP, TPM, Supply Chain Planning Systems, Workday Adaptive Planning |
| Core Challenge | Connecting Operational Drivers to confident Financial Decision-Making |
| Key Outcomes | Greater confidence in Forecasting, Decision-Making, and delivering on Customer commitments |
For Sanitarium, planning has never been just about budgets or reporting cycles. Across a manufacturing operation spanning Australia and New Zealand, the focus has always been understanding how operational decisions flow through to financial outcomes and ensuring leadership has confidence in the decisions being made.
As the organisation continued evolving its financial planning capability, Sanitarium needed a way to strengthen the connection between manufacturing activity, supply chain drivers, forecasting, and financial performance.
By combining Workday Adaptive Planning with the operational and supply chain systems already supporting the organisation, Sanitarium has continued to build a planning capability designed to support more confident decision-making.
About Sanitarium Health Food Co. (Sanitarium)
Sanitarium operates across Australia and New Zealand, supporting a broad product portfolio within a complex FMCG environment. For Grant Lewis, Commercial Manager responsible for Integrated Business Planning and New Business, effective planning starts with an understanding of how the business actually operates.
“I’ve been fortunate to work across multiple roles in the business including Finance, Production and Manufacturing management roles, which has given me a practical understanding of how various decisions across the business ultimately impact our financial performance.” – Grant Lewis Commercial Manager, S&OP, New Business at Sanitarium
That experience across finance, production, and manufacturing leadership roles provides a perspective that bridges operational activity and financial outcomes. This understanding became increasingly important as Sanitarium continued to evolve its financial planning.
Why Sanitarium Choose Workday Adaptive Planning
Long before implementing Workday Adaptive Planning, Sanitarium already had a mature planning process in place.
The business has developed internal systems to support forecasting and financial modelling alongside a well-established S&OP process. But as planning requirements continued evolving, maintaining internally developed solutions became increasingly difficult.
The challenge was not simply replacing spreadsheets or modernising reporting. The challenge was ensuring the business could continue building a financial planning capability that could handle manufacturing complexity while maintaining confidence in the assumptions, drivers, and outcomes behind the numbers.
“We wanted everything to be driver-based.”
For Sanitarium, financial planning needed to reflect the operational reality of the business. Changes in demand, supply chain assumptions and operating conditions needed to remain connected in a way that supported clear, logical financial outcomes.
“We needed the movement between forecast changes and financial outcomes to make logical sense.”
In manufacturing, planning decisions can have practical consequences across operations, supply chain and customer outcomes. Maintaining clear relationships between those areas was important because confidence in the forecast directly influences confidence in the broader business plan.
Workday Adaptive Planning provided flexibility to support that driver-based approach while integrating with the operational systems already embedded within the business.
Importantly, the platform also provided a foundation the business could continue evolving as requirements changed, without needing to continually rebuild planning logic as the organisation grew and adapted.
“The technology is important, however, when the people and processes are already strong, there’s a much easier path to adoption.”
That usability focus extended into reporting and day-to-day workflows across the organisation.
“If you have the right user interface, people shouldn’t need extensive training. It should feel intuitive.”
Why Sanitarium Works with GK Horizons
As Sanitarium evaluated planning platforms and implementation approaches, manufacturing understanding became an important differentiator.
The organisation reviewed multiple planning solutions before selecting Workday Adaptive Planning and GK Horizons.
For Grant and the broader team, the implementation partner needed to understand more than financial reporting requirements. The model needed to reflect operational relationships, manufacturing complexity, and the way the business actually operated.
“We all know when an implementor has read a textbook on manufacturing and can talk at a high level but then doesn’t really understand how to actually achieve those things.”
GK Horizons worked closely with Sanitarium’s commercial, operational, and IT teams to understand:
- manufacturing drivers
- operational relationships
- forecasting logic
- supply chain planning and deployment
- financial modelling requirements
That collaboration helped ensure the planning capability aligned to Sanitarium’s operational structure, forecasting processes, and decision-making requirements rather than forcing a generic implementation approach.
This became particularly important given the broader planning architecture already supporting the business, with Workday Adaptive Planning sitting alongside several operational, supply chain, and enterprise systems.
“GK Horizons understood the manufacturing complexity we were trying to model and the operational relationships behind it.”
How Sanitarium Uses Workday Adaptive Planning
Today, Workday Adaptive Planning supports Sanitarium’s broader driver-based financial planning capability.
The platform helps connect operational and financial information across the business, allowing commercial teams to better understand how movement in one area impacts outcomes elsewhere.
This includes understanding how changes in demand assumptions influence operational plans and financial performance across the organisation.
Rather than relying on disconnected assumptions, the organisation focuses on understanding:
- What is changing
- Why it is changing
- How movements impact financial outcomes
- What decisions need to be made
That approach helps strengthen confidence in forecasting conversations across leadership teams while maintaining alignment between operational reality and financial expectations.
What Sanitarium Has Gained
For Sanitarium, the outcome has not simply been faster reporting.
The larger benefit has been greater confidence in the planning process that supports operational decisions and customer outcomes. That confidence comes from connecting manufacturing activity, operational drivers, and financial forecasting into a more trusted planning process.
By maintaining stronger links between operational activity and financial outcomes, leadership teams have greater confidence that operational plans, supply chain decisions, and financial expectations remain aligned.
Where to Next
As Sanitarium continues evolving its operations, its planning capability will continue evolving alongside the business.
That includes continuing to learn from planning assumptions, reviewing outcomes and refining the way the business approaches future planning cycles. For the team, the objective remains consistent:
Maintaining our financial planning capability to continually support confident decision-making, in an ever-changing FMCG environment, while helping the organisation stay aligned around operational priorities, financial expectations and customer outcomes.
Leadership Perspective: Lessons for Manufacturing Organisations
Manufacturing organisations often face a common challenge. Operational decisions made across the business ultimately flow through to financial outcomes, yet those relationships are not always visible or well understood.
“It was about confidence in the drivers and confidence in our forecasting.” – Grant Lewis, Sanitarium
Sanitarium’s experience highlights the importance of maintaining clear links between operational drivers and financial performance. When leadership teams have confidence in the drivers behind the numbers, they are better positioned to evaluate change, understand trade-offs, and make decisions with greater confidence.
For manufacturing organisations, planning is most effective when operational reality, financial outcomes, and customer commitments remain connected.
Need to connect operational planning with financial outcomes?
GK Horizons works with manufacturing organisations to strengthen forecasting, driver-based planning and decision confidence through Workday Adaptive Planning.
