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, a fast growing international provider of core business software, headquartered in Oslo, Norway with over 1 million customers and >12.500 employees.
Like any tech company, it’s the aim of Visma Financial Solutions to deliver a seamless customer experience. This requires deep insights in the complete customer journey. 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
For Visma Financial Solutions, the business wouldn’t have been as well prepared for the future as it is now with TimeXtender. 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 in end-to-end customer journey
- Reporting and analysis was highly dependent on IT & analytics team
Solution
- Visma Financial Solutions deployed TimeXtender to build a modern data estate
- Data from three siloed production systems, an ERP system and additional sources are now easily accessible for reporting and analytics
Benefits
- New data sources can be added easily within minutes, instead of days or even weeks
- Visualisationof dataflows in data lake, data mart and data warehouse
- Tables can be joined together with drag and drop, it’s no longer needed to write complex SQL scripts or queries
- Time to market for information and insights is reduced to hours or days instead of weeks or months
- Sensitive data can be tagged for regulatory purposes
- Scarce IT and technical resources can now work on projects that add value (instead of fetching data)
- People are spending less time on data preparation and more time on data analysis
- The business makes data-driven decisions (instead of decisions based on gut feelings)
- Data is now available to everyone who needs it, anytime
TimeXtender : September 27, 2021
TimeXtender