It is not just a question of technology in terms of software and features. It is also a question of working with the right team to implement the technology and make it work just right for your business and your specific needs. It is in fact equally important to achieve success.

Ask Flemming Ib Windfeld, CFO at Uhrenholt - a global company supplying meat, seafood, vegetables and dairy products to a wide range of professional customers across the globe.

"Over the course of just over 30 years we have grown tremendously from a small, traditional trading company to a global player with a rather complex organisation. Our business has more than 70 legal entities, making our consolidation very complex and time consuming. It simply wasn't viable anymore to work manually with endless Excel-sheets across the organisation," says Flemming Ib Windfeld.

So Uhrenholt did the obvious thing: They looked around for a solution to facilitate easy consolidation and, later, budgeting. Eventually choosing SAP BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation for Microsoft, Uhrenholt also teamed up with a SAP consultancy to help implement the solution and tailor it to Uhrenholt's needs.

A different approach

Says Flemming Ib Windfeld: "This was where things began to go seriously wrong. The people we were working with simply couldn't make it work. The system never came up with the right numbers, and when I joined Uhrenholt, I was asked to scrap the entire project and find another solution."

However, having learned about the challenges, Affecto persuaded Uhrenholt to give SAP BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation a second chance. More specifically, it was suggested to bring in two specialists from Affecto for two days to run a simulation based on Uhrenholt's business case and prove the problem wasn't the software.

"When I met the people from Affecto it quickly became clear to me that they had a completely different approach. They understood our business, provided insightful advice and challenged us on a highly professional level."

"Consequently, we decided to change the scope and asked Affecto simply to go to work and see how far they could get in four days, instead of setting up a simulation. Four days later we were getting the right numbers and began to see that the solution could be the right one for us after all," says Flemming Ib Windfeld.

Capitalising on investment

The rest, as they say, is history. "We are very happy with the way things turned out. It simply feels right, and we are obviously also happy that our initial investment in SAP BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation licenses was not lost forever. We honestly thought that the problem was with the software and we were willing to accept that the money spent on licenses was lost. But we learned how much difference it makes to bring the right partner on board, and now we are capitalising on our investment," says Flemming Ib Windfeld.

He and his team of 20 in Uhrenholt's finance department are already seeing some of the benefits:

"It has an intuitive user interface, and we only have to make a change once in one single place to have the fully updated set of numbers that actually reflect the truth. The system also has some powerful features to set up automated processes, and next up for us is to utilise the report generation tools."

"Then we will work with Affecto to implement the budgeting and planning features. We envision rolling the system out widely across our organisation to harness all SAP BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation's powers. The way we see it, it is not just a finance system."