Case Study: Bucknell University achieves seamless, collaborative budgeting with Workday Adaptive Planning (Workday)

Bucknell University creates seamless workflows with cloud planning

Bucknell University, a private liberal arts college in Lewisburg, PA with about 3,600 students, faced a cumbersome budgeting process driven by roughly 200 spreadsheets and 150 department cost center managers. The manual approach produced data integrity issues, limited reporting capacity from a two-person finance team, and low executive engagement—making it difficult to reallocate funds to priority initiatives like diversity and inclusion.

Bucknell implemented Workday Adaptive Planning alongside Workday HCM and Financial Management and trained 150 users, creating a seamless, automated workflow and self-service reporting. The solution improved collaboration and data accuracy, saved significant time (allowing budget completion a week earlier than before), increased executive involvement with daily budget check-ins, and enabled the university to reallocate dollars toward strategic priorities.

Bucknell University

Andrea Featherstone

Director of Budgets and Financial Modeling