Plantagen was founded in 1986 in Norway and has since grown into a chain with more than 120 stores spread across Finland, Norway and Sweden. As a large group, order and structure are required to keep track of figures and to create the conditions for rapid analyses. To facilitate the work, Plantagen chose Binovis’ service Cumulus BI as a tool for budgeting, forecasting and financial follow-up.

– Cumulus BI has enabled a smooth and transparent process for budgeting and forecasting,” says Jonas Rodling, Director Business Control at Plantagen.

Cumulus BI
With many years of experience in financial follow-up and planning, Binovi has developed Cumulus BI that helps companies with budgeting, forecasting and follow-up. The service is flexible and easy to adapt to the specific needs of different industries. Cumulus BI is also web-based, which allows for a quick and easy introduction without major implementation projects.

– Cumulus BI is more flexible than sending lots of Excel files back and forth and keeping track of who made what changes. Now it is easy for me to check what has been changed and who changed what in the forms. There aren’t lots of different Excel files with different versions, where I don’t know who changed what,” says Jonas Rodling.

New areas of use
Despite the versatile functionality of the service, Jonas Rodling says he sees new areas where the service could be used in the future. This is in line with the increased regulations on sustainability reporting.

– I think that more sustainability will be moved to the finance functions, and I think you can use Cumulus BI for that. In the tool, you can design some forms and summaries, to easily report things. Instead of emailing Excel files, you can send a report to the people who need to report things and they will do it. Companies need to find a system to consolidate their sustainability information. It is unsustainable to sit with Excel files and it will be too cluttered. CBI is a flexible database that could take on these functions.

High level of service
Plantagen works frequently with Cumulus BI and creates forecasts every month in the service. Jonas Rodling says that he usually have a couple of days to create the forecasts and therefore a high level of service is desirable.

– What we like about Binovi is that they are very close and personal where they care about the customer and that it should work. We get help with what went wrong and how to solve it. It works very well, Jonas Rodling concludes.