Case Study: Cumulus Media achieves faster forecasting and data‑driven decision‑making with Workday Adaptive Planning

Modernizing Strategic Finance to Boost Competitive Advantage

Cumulus Media, a leading U.S. radio broadcaster with 454 stations reaching 245 million people across 90 media markets, faced rising competition from digital audio and needed to modernize finance to support faster, decentralized decision-making. The company struggled with cumbersome reporting, slow forecasting across markets, and limited sales modeling—hindering executives, sales managers, and market teams from getting timely, actionable insights.

By implementing Workday Adaptive Planning, Cumulus automated budgeting and reporting, deployed self-service analytics, introduced weekly “Flash Forecasting Fridays,” and built in-depth sales models for advertising products and client trends. The result: real-time visibility and collaboration, report generation reduced from days to seconds, earlier quarterly forecasting and clearer variances to plan, improved programming and pricing decisions, lower IT costs, and broad organizational adoption toward data-driven finance.

Cumulus Media

J.P. Hannan

Senior Vice President, Treasurer & CFO