Centralized data and reduced manual effort behind budgeting and revenue forecasting processes
Self-serve dashboards reduced the number of requests for information received by their Operations Controller
Global team accesses dashboards to support decision making around pricing and sales targets
The Challenge: Streamlining Budgeting and Forecasting Insights Across a Global Business
Hours spent creating templates to fuel budgeting and revenue forecasting. Connecting the right data to Excel spreadsheets and an external reporting tool to share information across teams. Manually formatting data and digging through historical information to get the insights required.
That was the reality that Louis Liu was used to. Louis is the Operations Controller at Lifting Solutions, a global business that engineers, manufactures, distributes, sells and services artificial lift products.
But that process was taxing and inefficient for the entire team. “There are a lot of layers, product lines and departments,” Louis says. “So, it’s quite challenging to develop universal templates that can easily roll up to a final corporate budget or forecast.”
The Lifting Solutions team needed a better solution: a platform that would help them streamline their budgeting and forecasting processes, centralizing data and offering access to the people that needed it.
They also needed to ensure that the system they chose could support the level of detail they needed (particularly, tracking sales budget at a product level, which their ERP Microsoft Dynamics couldn’t provide) and act as their single source of truth.
“We have a reporting system called Jet Analytics, which is powerful for reporting, but its budget tools were not sufficient for our business," says Louis. "We chose Vena for its ability to handle budgets and feed data back into the reporting system. Jet supplies data to Vena, which keeps all budget data.”
Once Vena was implemented and integrated into their business, Lifting Solutions recognized the potential to do even more with the platform they’d selected.
Democratizing Data to Fuel Sales Decisions With Vena's Power BI Connector
Even with Vena in place, Louis would receive multiple requests a day from teams across the business, looking for data that would take him anywhere from two to 10 minutes to find.
“There was a request from our client solutions and operations teams, to have a view of our monthly sales progress against our target,” Louis says. “But there wasn’t a centralized self-serve tool to help them understand our sales process. There were some reports, but there wasn’t any quick and easy way for them to see it.”
That’s where Vena’s Power BI Connector came in. Vena partner ProLytics Consulting Group—an expert with deep knowledge of Power BI, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and business analytics—helped the team successfully push their Vena data into their Power BI instance. This allowed Louis and his team to provide the real-time data visualization capabilities their teams were looking for.
The consolidated reporting created through Vena’s Power BI connector helps Lifting Solutions’ client solutions team gain better visibility into sales and make more strategic bidding and pricing decisions.
They rely on “historical data, total sales dollars and product quality to predict future sales and base their pricing decisions,” says Louis. The dashboard “helps them quickly see trends within the year and make pricing decisions. Without a dashboard, it's hard to see historical performance without opening multiple files.”
Lifting Solutions’ sales team also gains value from the dashboard, as they can quickly see if sales are on target, or if there are gaps to cover. “If they see anything lacking or short of the target, they do a deeper dive to understand the issue and support the client in making more sales,” says Louis. “If a client exceeds the budget or targets, they analyze the reasons for success and try to replicate it with other clients.”
Today, Louis saves multiple hours per week as 10 to 20 people across the business use the dashboard on a daily to weekly basis to access the information they need, without his help. “It's straightforward to see, and a very intuitive design,” Louis says. “And they like that they can just play with it themselves instead of asking me every time they want to see something.”
Louis hopes to expand the company’s usage of Vena further in the future, too, to create dynamic views of inventory, working capital, cash flow, debt, credit and so on. “And then, essentially my vision is to incorporate AI into the dashboard to predict our sales margins,” he says. “If we can be leveraging AI to have that forecast then that would be super.”
One benefit of Vena is that it's cloud-based, so you can access it from anywhere with a login. Our consolidation and operations teams don't run reports; they run operations and make sales. A web-based platform empowers them to locate the data they need.”
Louis Liu
Operations Controller, Lifting Solutions