The solution implemented in response to Valamis' needs saves a lot of time for the financial management function and improves the reliability of income statement forecasts
Valamis is an internationally growing IT company that specializes in digital learning and workforce development. Valamis' learning technology helps customers develop workforce capabilities to address the needs of working life in the future. The company's customers include large organizations, particularly in finance, manufacturing and expert services. Headquartered in Joensuu, Finland, Valamis also has offices in the United States, England, Germany, the Netherlands, India and Russia.
Valamis needed a comprehensive financial planning solution. CFO Mika Hurskainen described the company's starting point as follows:
"We have an ERP system, a CRM system and an order processing system. Sales forecasts, complete with revenue recognition and partial revenue recognition, from all of these systems need to be consolidated to create a single net sales forecast that comprises multiple dimensions. We should be able to retrieve data on HR expenses from the HR system. Purchases and part of OpEx could be calculated directly from sales, using drivers."
Invenco (now part of Innofactor) delivered a Jedox-based financial planning system to Valamis. In addition to traditional monthly financial planning, the new solution comprises income statement forecasts reported to Valamis' Board of Directors, extensive simulation functionality, version control, comprehensive integration interfaces, and integration with Valamis' CRM, data warehouse and reporting environments.
The Jedox planning system deployment project was implemented using an iterative and agile scrum-based approach between key persons from Invenco and Valamis in the summer and fall of 2021. The new solution went into production use in fall 2021.
Using Jedox to produce the income statement forecasts that are reported to the company's Board of Directors on a monthly basis now takes about one person-day for Valamis' financial management unit. With the previously used Excel templates, putting the forecast together took several days, and the reliability and transparency of the figures were considerably worse.
The Jedox solution used by Valamis makes it easy to simulate the forecast and create forecast scenarios at the group level or for specific companies. Version management for the administrator users has been made highly flexible but simultaneously disciplined to control the forecasting and reporting process. The simulations are used to create a single confirmed and reported forecast on a monthly basis.
In addition to a comprehensive solution developed on a completely customer-driven basis, Jedox technology provides Valamis with significant added value thanks to its excellent integration tool. Consolidating customer data, project data and product-level data from three different source systems would have been challenging without highly effective integration functionality. A monthly employee expense forecast is now also prepared on the basis of data imported from an external HR system. The strengths of Jedox became very evident in the downloading of data and the consolidation of data, which were demanding in certain respects.
The following solutions, among others, are part of the overall solution implemented for Valamis:
For Valamis, the company's Jedox project also served as an input for the development of the planning solution's source systems. The data requirements of the forecasting model helped Valamis simultaneously develop its sales CRM system, data warehouse and integrations, as well as data on wages and terms of employment maintained in the HR system.
The Jedox development process has continued at Valamis after the implementation of the sales planning model and full income statement planning model. The finishing touches are now being put to a cash flow forecasting model implemented on Jedox. The cash flow model is closely integrated with sales data and accounts payable data. The admin user can flexibly assess items affecting cash management at Valamis, even at the daily level. The income statement forecast produced at the early stages of the project has naturally been integrated with the cash flow model. As a rule, the longer-term cash flow forecast is derived from the figures in the income statement forecast.
On June 30, 2022, Innofactor acquired the entire share capital of Invenco Oy, a privately owned company specializing in data solutions. As of July 1, 2022, Invenco Oy's name was changed to Innofactor Invenco Oy. Invenco's employees continue their work with the new company. The roles and duties of Invenco's experts remained unchanged.
Please refer to our stock exchange release for more information on the acquisition.
Stock exchange release: Innofactor acquires Invenco