CORT Business Services Selects Adaptive Planning

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - Aug 8, 2011) - Adaptive Planning, the worldwide leader in on-demand corporate performance management (CPM) solutions for companies and nonprofits of all sizes, today announced that CORT Business Services, the world's largest provider of rental furniture, has adopted the Adaptive Planning solution to power its budgeting and forecasting processes. By replacing a complex set of separately maintained spreadsheets with Adaptive Planning's collaborative, easy-to-use, and rapidly-deployable solution, CORT has been able to cut its budget process in half and reduce forecasting time by up to 80 percent.

A Berkshire Hathaway company with 2,200 employees in 42 states and more than $350 million in annual revenue, CORT has served more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 as its customers. CORT was previously operating with a large number of isolated spreadsheets. Manually consolidating plans from 50 operating districts to regional and company levels was extremely time consuming, and resulted in significant version control challenges.

After evaluating multiple vendors, CORT realized that Adaptive Planning stood out not only for its ability to streamline organizational consolidations and establish a "single version of the truth," but also for its intuitive, Excel-like look and feel, which simplified user training requirements. What's more, the solution was affordable, and did not require any IT support.

"We wanted to make a change, but did not want something difficult to learn. Everything else was too big, too time consuming, too expensive, and 'too much' for a company of our size," said Deborah Lansford, CFO at CORT. "Adaptive Planning was the only solution that made sense -- it offers a huge leap forward in terms of functionality, without turning everyone's world upside down. Now we can start the budgeting process later in the year and still be confident in finishing on time, which allows us to use more up-to-date assumptions and deliver a more accurate budget."

In a short period of time, CORT deployed Adaptive Planning, integrated the solution with their ERP system, and rolled it out to more than 120 contributors. They have been able to cut their budgeting process in half, and have reduced the time spent on monthly forecasting from as many as 5 days to just 1 day. They can more easily perform what-if analyses to understand, for example, how changes in assumptions for rented units or rates would impact their financial statements. And all of these processes are far more collaborative and participatory.

"We are pleased that we have been able to help CORT transform their manual, spreadsheet-based budgeting and forecasting exercises into efficient, high-value processes capable of significantly improving their corporate performance and driving new growth," said Greg Schneider, Vice President of Marketing at Adaptive Planning.

About CORT
For more than 35 years, CORT has been the nation's leading provider of rental furniture with a global network of affiliates in more than 50 countries. CORT, a Berkshire Hathaway company headquartered in Fairfax, Va., also provides the nation's most comprehensive range of rental relocation services, including online apartment search services at www.ApartmentSearch.com. CORT's customers include more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. For more information, please visit www.cort.com.

About Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning is the worldwide leader in on-demand corporate performance management (CPM) solutions for companies and nonprofits of all sizes. Adaptive Planning's solutions allow finance and management teams to obtain real-time visibility into performance metrics, streamline financial planning and reporting, and drive better business decisions. By offering affordable annual subscriptions and rapid implementations, and by eliminating the need for new hardware and IT support, Adaptive Planning makes it easy to move beyond spreadsheet-based processes without the cost and complexity associated with traditional on-premise CPM applications. Adaptive Planning is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. and can be reached at 650-528-7500 or www.adaptiveplanning.com.