F5 brings Workforce Planning into Power BI with Acterys

Anatoliy Chermoshnyuk, Financial Systems Manager at F5, owns the planning environment behind that work. He describes himself as a liaison for the liaisons, the person who makes sure the planning model, the reporting, and the integrations all work together. Before F5, he managed a similar planning platform at other companies, so he knew the category well and knew what good looked like.

“My role is making sure the planning model, the reporting, and the integrations all work together,” Anatoliy explained.

The Challenge

For years, F5 planned in Clarity, a lightweight, customizable platform the team knew inside and out. The planning processes worked well. The technology underneath them had stopped moving forward.

“The product worked. It was lightweight, customizable, and easy for our department to manage. The problem was that it stopped evolving,” Anatoliy said.

Clarity had changed hands several times, and development had effectively stopped. It was also tied to Internet Explorer. As Microsoft moved on from that browser and F5’s security requirements tightened, the platform became harder to justify, and eventually IT would no longer support it.

“We weren’t looking because the process didn’t work. We were looking because the technology underneath it wasn’t keeping up,” Anatoliy explained.

F5 did not want to change how it planned. The team wanted to keep the flexibility, control, and familiarity it had built over many years, and move it onto a modern, secure, Microsoft-native foundation. As the search took shape, a few requirements stayed constant. The new platform had to build on the Microsoft tools F5 already owned, Power BI and SQL Server. It had to let the Finance team make its own changes without calling a consultant every time. And it had to avoid locking the team into another proprietary stack to learn.

The Solution

F5 evaluated the major enterprise planning options before choosing Acterys. What stood out was that Acterys matched the planning philosophy F5 had already built, now running natively on the Microsoft stack.

“It felt like the next generation of what we already had,” Anatoliy said.

Because Acterys ran on the SQL Server and Power BI environment F5 already owned, the move was a modernization rather than a redesign.

“Implementing Acterys was basically changing the plumbing. We already knew how Power BI, SQL, and everything worked,” Anatoliy explained.

The team kept its existing integrations, security model, and planning logic, and rebuilt its familiar templates in Acterys so people could keep working the way they already did.

“One of the reasons we chose Acterys was that we could create templates that looked very similar to what our people already knew. The learning curve was much shorter, and people started using it right away,” Anatoliy said.

The change that mattered most was what Acterys did to F5’s Power BI reports. Power BI on its own is read-only: it shows the numbers, but you cannot change them there. Acterys makes those same reports two-way. Planners enter plan data directly in Power BI, it writes back to F5’s SQL Server, and the reports reprocess.

“It’s a lot of logic built in SQL, used as write-back through Power BI,” Anatoliy said.

That shift is clearest in Workforce Planning. In Clarity, when a planner changed headcount, seeing the effect on salary, benefits, and the wider P&L meant asking the administrator to run a full model refresh. In Acterys, the planner does it themselves.

“You enter the people, do a refresh, and within seconds the impact flows through to every report, right down to the variance report,” Anatoliy said.

The difference is not only speed, it is self-service. Planners can test scenarios as they work, without waiting for an administrator to be available to refresh the model.

That same setup runs across F5’s planning. The team plans its full company P&L in Power BI and Acterys, spanning expense, workforce, and capital planning, on the Microsoft tools it already runs.

“We’re a Microsoft company. Expenses, salary and benefits, headcount, capital, it all lives inside Power BI and Acterys,” Anatoliy said.

Actuals stay current automatically. Headcount and financial data load into the environment several times a day, so plans always sit on live numbers.

For Anatoliy, the Acterys team has been part of the value, not just the platform. When he raises a question or a request, Acterys gets back to him quickly, often the same day, and its documentation and tutorials give the team a deep library to answer its own questions.

“No product is perfect. What matters is having people who respond, and Acterys does. I put in a ticket, and someone on their team gets back to me quickly,” he said.

The Results

• Modernized a legacy planning platform onto a Microsoft-native foundation, without changing F5’s established Planning processes.
• Turned read-only Power BI reports into a two-way planning surface, with plan inputs writing back to F5’s own SQL Server.
• Made Workforce Planning more self-service: planners can experiment with what-if scenarios, refresh in Power BI, and see the salary, benefits, and variance impact in seconds.
• Plans the full company P&L in Power BI across expense, workforce, and capital, now in its third annual planning cycle on Acterys.
• Built entirely on F5’s existing Microsoft investment in Power BI and SQL Server, avoiding a new proprietary stack.

What’s Next

F5 continues to extend its planning environment, and the focus is on doing more inside Power BI. The team is working to give more of the business self-service access to plans and results through Power BI, to move work that still happens by hand, such as tracking budget transfers between organizations, into Acterys, and to bring newly integrated systems like procurement into the planning environment.

“It’s about making small improvements, adding capabilities, and continuing to build on what we already have,” Anatoliy said.

For F5, the win has been modernizing its planning platform without disrupting the processes that already served the business well. Rather than adopting a new way of working, F5 brought its proven planning processes into Power BI, on a modern foundation that keeps evolving with the business.