What to do when you run a rapidly growing business and your current system for budgeting across numerous entities is no longer supported? In the case of Orifarm Group, a Danish founded company focusing on generics and parallel imported pharmaceuticals, the answer was a two-pronged approach:

“We screened the market for viable solutions and ended up with four different tools we felt could meet our demands. Having looked more closely at our options, we settled for SAP BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation for Microsoft. Then we talked to a number of consultancies in order to find the right people to work with,” explains Jacob Berg Lucassen, VP Finance at Orifarm Group.

The company spans 28 legal entities operating in seven countries. With more than 800 employees and turnover exceeding EUR 600 million, budgeting across the group’s many departments each responsible for their own numbers is no easy task. Consequently, Jacob Berg Lucassen and his team had a set of clearly defined requirements to the system itself and the consultants to help implement it:

Meet demands in the future

“With regards to the system, we were looking for a flexible solution that we think will also meet our demands in the future, such as organisational changes on group level. We also had certain requirements to how the solution integrates with other applications, data security issues and not least how easy it is to set up, develop and maintain,” says Jacob Berg Lucassen.

He found that SAP BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation meets all of those demands - and admits to being slightly surprised: “We don’t run SAP ERP but Microsoft and were initially not convinced that a SAP based solution in a non-SAP environment would be a perfect match. However, it turns out that SAP BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation is fully supported and integrates easily with other environments such as MS.”

Looking at the consultancies, Jacob Berg Lucassen and his team wanted a serious, challenging and professional partner with the right set of competences - and with sufficient resources to step up at any time if needed: As Jacob Berg Lucassen puts it, “we have a policy of not working with very small subcontractors”.

Completed on schedule

Affecto qualified on all accounts, and despite a fairly tight deadline, a summer holiday season and other significant projects (implementation of a new group ERP system), implementation was completed on schedule, three months after the contract was signed.

“One of the areas where Affecto’s people really stand out is their ability to understand the business side of things. They were not only talking and thinking about technology but also put great effort in understanding our business and what we need.”

“They are competent and experienced to a degree where they could challenge us in the way we were thinking and how we wanted to do things. As a result we not only have a budgeting solution that is right for us and works the way it should - we have also learned a lot,” says Jacob Berg Lucassen.

A whole new level

He expects to roll out SAP Business-Objects Planning & Consolidation to 80 users across the organisation soon. The objective: Even more transparency. “Our department heads are responsible for their own budgets. When they not only send in their numbers but can actually see in real time how they are performing, we have a whole new level of transparency that enables us to act on discrepancies and changes faster and more efficiently.”

The next step for Orifarm Group is to harness the full power of SAP BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation with its consolidation features. “It is the obvious way to go. The features are built into the system, so it’s just a question of when we have resources to take one more step,” says Jacob Berg Lucassen.