Velux Gets More Transparency
Ulrich Gammelgaard, CFO of Danish window company Velux, talks to business paper Børsen about creating simplicity and transparency with SAP HANA and SAP BPC. Speeding up predictions, 50 finance departments have now become one, adding more transparency and agility. With additional IT support, the global window producer can now follow and react to the market in real time. “In recent years, it has been difficult to predict the markets and consumer behavior. We see it as a combination of things generally going faster today – and the financial crisis. And since the world is changing with greater urgency, our old methods were not good enough,” says Gammelgaard. With rolling forecasts, they now make monthly predictions more accurate. “It’s kind of a compass, which continuously shows how and where we stand – and whether we are on the right
track. When doing rolling forecasts, we’re pulling in millions of data. We could do that before as well, but it took much longer. Now, we have gone from days to hours,” adds Gammelgaard. “But we have not centralized things. We have globalized them, so all our stores in the world are now part of what we call global finance. This means that the person responsible for a country may well sit in a different country.” This exercise has resulted in a dramatic simplification of the business, which by Ulrich Gammelgaard is
described as a long value chain. “We do run Velux better than we did before,” he says. (Original in Danish)
Source: borsen.dk (Denmark) | 16.12.2014