Invoicing, debt collection and legal expertise: the credit management solutions from Visma Financial Solutions cover the entire Order to Cash process in a way that strengthens customer relationships and reduces credit risks. The company is part of the Visma Group, an Oslo-based provider of business software.
Visma Financial Solutions wants to understand the full customer journey, from invoice to payment. However, with three siloed operating systems, the company was struggling to turn data into information, let alone use these insights to reveal actions to improve the business. Magne Klonteig Nielsen, Head of Business Development & Analytics at Visma Financial Solutions: “Our siloed operating and analytics systems didn’t provide us with the full picture needed to better our business. Each system was built differently and entail large and complex amounts of data. An initial attempt to develop a data warehouse ended up being yet another siloed approach. To prepare for the future we needed to adopt an agile and holistic strategy for data management and analytics.”
The first important step Magne’s team took in this process was to approach Visma BWise, the Oslo-based subsidiary in the Visma Group with rich skills and competences in business intelligence and data warehousing. Magne explains: “Visma BWise is Norway’s leading centre of expertise in this field, and we felt they would be the best partner to evaluate our initial attempt and work with us on a business case for the future. They quickly pointed us in the direction of Timextender as modern and powerful tool for building and maintaining a professional data warehouse – faster, better and automated. They showed us how Timextender would help us implement and operate data lakes, data warehouses and data marts without writing code, and would provide us with good traceability and insight into how things are connected, right up to analysis and reports. With Timextender we foresaw a future whereby the business would gain access to the information it needs, when it needs it, with automated processes to get data ready for analysis. The latter would free up our valuable time for more strategic tasks.”
“With Timextender we foresaw a future whereby the business would gain access to the information it needs, when it needs it, with automated processes to get data ready for analysis.” - Magne Klonteig Nielsen, Head of Business Development & Analytics at Visma Financial Solutions
Magne: “Timextender is simply one of those tools that you cannot do without. Even though hardly anyone knows it’s there, it’s a key component in order to become a data-driven organization. Without Timextender, access to data would be scarce and the time to information and insights would be long. We can make data available to everyone, anytime. We can quickly adjust and set-up correct KPI’s. We can make more decisions based on facts instead of intuition. Our team sometimes calls it the ‘Ketchup Effect’. When you squeeze a bottle of ketchup, everything comes out. When you deploy Timextender, the hidden need for data insights comes out. When we have deployed a new report, we can count on a call or an email from a business leader within a couple of hours for a new request. This means that the data is being used to make decisions and to take the right actions for our business.”
“Timextender is simply one of those tools that you cannot do without. Even though hardly anyone knows it’s there, it’s a key component in order to become a data-driven organisation.” - Magne Klonteig Nielsen, Head of Business Development & Analytics at Visma Financial Solutions
Challenges
- With three siloed operating systems, the company was struggling to turn data into information
- Lack of insight into the end-to-end customer journey
- Reporting and analysis werethe cmaohighly dependent on IT & analytics team
Solution
- Visma Financial Solutions deployed Timextender, with Visma BWise, to build a central data lake, data warehouse and data marts
- Data from three production systems, an ERP system and other sources is now available for reporting and analytics
Benefits
- Time to insight cut from weeks or months to hours or days
- New data sources added in minutes instead of days or weeks
- Tables joined with drag and drop, so the team writes far fewer complex SQL scripts
- Data flows visible from data lake to data marts, with sensitive data tagged for regulatory purposes
- IT and analysts spend their time on analysis, not on fetching and preparing data
Timextender
