Oivalo

Case SYNLAB

SYNLAB is Finland's largest private producer for laboratory examinations and imaging services. SYNLAB takes care of the well-being of Finns by offering advanced, innovative and effective services for regular health monitoring and disease prevention. It produces services for the public and private sector, private healthcare providers, insurance companies, health insurance funds and private customers. The head office and main laboratory are located in Helsinki. SYNLAB uses around 160 cost centers in budgeting.

SYNLAB started using OIVALO's budgeting system during spring 2021. The main reason for the change was to modernize the budget process, that was previously based on a large number of different Excel files. The Excel-based budgeting was considered vulnerable and the management took a lot of time, especially from the responsible persons of group's finance.

Due the differences in Excel sheets, summing up the numbers at the group level was almost entirely done manually. It went so far, that the numbers for the budget had to be recorded to Excel at a higher level, to reduce the time spent on manual combining work.

The project to transfer to SYNLAB budgeting process into Oivalo platform was very fast. The initial planning was done in a two-hours meeting, and after about a week, everyone in SYNLAB Finland had the opportunity to record their budgeting figures by using OIVALO's cloud-based budgeting system.

There was hardly any resistance to change. Quite the contrary, the new service was especially liked by the most skilled Excel users. In addition, the end users were relieved by the fact that in the new model they could modify the Excel the most suitable time for them -without need to wait while other users had the excels locked for their modifications.

At the finance department, the implementation of OIVALO allowed more time to be used for the most important financial and reporting work. There is now a possibility to use much more time to build relevant Power BI reports, and the controllers focus their time on analyzing the numbers. Managing the process is "100 times easier" and enables the budgeting to be a lot faster and forecasting a lot effortless compared when working with Excels.

In SYNLAB, OIVALO's budgeting platform is tightly integrated with Power BI. During the beginning of budgeting and forecasting period, the actuals from previous year are brought from Power BI to OIVALO. And other way around, budgets by cost centers are shown in Power BI next to actuals. As all the numbers are originated from cloud base platform, it’s possible to include both budgeted and actual figures into all reports at the level of different cost centers as well as whole group.

• More time spent on financial analyses than Excel validation
• Reducing human errors during budgeting
• Speeding up the budgeting process
• Comparison of actuals to budgeted without added manual work

Case NoHo Partners Plc

NoHo Partners Plc is a Finnish restaurant group behind approximately 250 restaurants, bars, pubs, nightclubs and entertainment centres.

Oivalo Planning allows NoHo to take control of nearly 300 cost centers requiring Profit&Loss budgeting and forecasting in three currencies. Previous model was Excel based and was time consuming to fill, version handling and consolidation was practically impossible.

• Group consolidation of planned numbers with easy steer and control of the process
• Capability to handle great amount of users from single restaurant manager to a group and division level executives
• Delivery of reference numbers to the end user in an environment which requires strict data access restrictions (PLC)
• Easy data integration from and to internal masterdata (like Cost center structure, actuals) and BI system
• Running forecast enabler with versioning
• Handle planning in different currencies from Norway and Denmark too
• Combined with Oivalo Account Manager – a SaaS software for PL report control – it is possible for the users to see the planned values with reference actuals on familiar P&L report models

Case HopLop

HopLop is children’s indoor exercise and adventure park chain in Finland and Germany with 17 parks in total.

HopLop needed a planning tool for daily sales and Profit and Loss budgeting. The requirement was to combine planning from daily sales to monthly revenue with same input numbers - one input to one sales and to one revenue. One driver, usually the amount of children, gives the best understanding about business, rather than separate sales and revenue budget.

• Easy versioning of budgets and forecasts
• Complex, but understandable drivers.
• Amount of children per day * Ticket price * Days when park is open = Entrance sales.
• Amount of employees * Average salary = Salary expenses
• etc...
• Aligned with sales and bookkeeping data
• Data integration back to internal BI system (Qlik) with Oivalo PL extension

Case Nevel Oy

Nevel operates more than 130 energy production sites and manages over 40 district heating networks in Finland, Sweden and Estonia

The company was recently separated from Vapo Group and carveout of systems and processes had to be done. To take control of financial planning, Nevel chose Oivalo at the end of Q3 2021 due to proven concept of fast deployment and advanced features required to align with Nevel’s business model and planning logic. The project was finalized in time and 2022 budgeting was completed for over 200 cost centers with Oivalo Planning just in few weeks after the project kick-off.

Nevel controller summarizes that: “Driver based modeling was our key requirement to enable planning on site level. Megawatt hours, fuel amounts and other input are converted to full profit and loss plan for each site in Oivalo. Support for multiple currencies and possibility to quickly create new forecasts based on previous planning values and current actuals was also very important and we have found that it is easily done in Oivalo.”