Shift to five-quarter rolling forecast in under 3 months

Sandvik Mining and Construction Oy, located in Finland, is an Affiliated Company of Sandvik Group with 2,000 employees and €1.6 billion in annual revenue. This legal entity had four reporting entities in three locations covering 450 cost centers, all with different processes, reporting timetables, and instructions, and all working in Excel.

Every time Sarah Sjöstrand, Manager in Site Business Control, and her colleagues in the other sites in Sandvik Finland, needed to update data, do allocations with 200 allocation rules at the account cost center and project level, or gather and analyze that data from different versions, it posed a major challenge. It wasn’t easy for cost center owners, either—these end users, whose experience is more technical than financial, struggled to retrieve data from its various locations and identify where to add information into the appropriate spreadsheet.

The challenge moved beyond allocations when Sandvik Group reporting demanded a more detailed five-quarter rolling forecast. Sarah and her colleagues knew they needed to make a change to their process. She explains, “The Excel budgeting templates we were using and the request for a detailed five-quarter rolling forecast weren’t going to work together.”

In order to provide the five-quarter rolling forecast and make the entire financial planning process easier for their team, Sandvik reporting entities in Finland began the search for a system that could help. They had four requirements for the software, which were met in Jedox:

• An adaptable organizational structure to help them manage the constant changes of a large entity with many divisions as well as R&D projects.
• Ability to forecast by individual project.
• Capabilities to help them smoothly manage complex allocations with over 200 rules.
• Integrations with existing technology like Power BI to align with their current reporting process.

The Sandvik team in Finland found that the Jedox platform would allow them to adjust scenarios and models with unlimited dimensions, so that they could quickly self-serve forecasting projects and allocations.

After choosing Jedox, they launched Phase 1 of their project in three months, quite fast and easily, according to Sarah. Jedox worked with local reporting entities in Sandvik Finland on a change management process and vision to take the disjointed pieces and connect them in one cohesive planning process. Sarah adds, “The process was easier than I expected from the beginning. We got the end users on board with very little resistance or questions, and the commentary was generally, ‘This is easy to use, and it goes much faster.’ So I think that says it was a good implementation.”

Phase 1 of their Jedox launch included P&L, fixed costs for cost center owners, and sales-related costs. Phase 2 covered balance sheets and investments. And by integrating Jedox with their data warehouse, they can retrieve and model accounting, investment, and R&D project data. Sarah says, “We now have a better view of the whole financial planning process with Jedox.”

Leveraging Jedox has increased the caliber of the local entities of Sandvik Finland’s financial planning process by generating top-down visibility and bottom-up efficiency. The finance team has gained accuracy, both in terms of quality control and in financial projections. Sarah said, “In finance we have been able to reallocate our workload from preparing the data to analyzing it, which we hardly had time or methods to do previously.”

Entities in Sandvik Finland now use input templates via secure, web- and permission-based data collection to gather data needed for forecasting from end users, who find using Jedox faster and simpler than the old method. Sarah adds, “We don’t need to do much before we start a new round of forecasting. We have everything in Jedox, and we just have to fill in the data. Because it’s current, we are able to follow what’s happening all the time.”

Because Power BI is part of Sandvik standard operating procedures, the finance team decided to implement reporting through Power BI, as opposed to Jedox’s drag-and-drop dashboarding capabilities. Through the Jedox-Power BI integration, they can create reports for themselves and cost center owners. This increased simplicity and visibility of performance offers cost center owners new insights into their own numbers, leading them to be more engaged, contributive, and collaborative, sharing processes and deriving insights more easily. Sarah explains, “It’s really important that they’re interested because that’s the only way we can get them more involved.”

Better planning in Jedox paired with short time to value has led to pleased customers. “We are happy with the end result. It’s working as it should be and as we thought it would from the beginning,” says Sarah. As they expand with Jedox, Sandvik Finland plans to further improve speed and efficiency via templated reports, AI, and automation.