Wessanen uses CXO-Cockpit to provide one single point of truth in a reporting tool available for allWessanen is a multinational branded food company with locations in six countries. Not only does Wes -sanen’s broad portfolio of healthy, organic and fair-trade products yield a huge quantity of �nancial data, but its dynamic acquisition and divestiture strategy also generates considerable complexity to its reporting environment. Having previously worked with Oracle Hyperion Enterprise, Wessanen has since migrated to Tagetik. CXO-Cockpit has been the stable factor in this transition, allowing the �nance department to greatly increase the quality and agility of their reporting process and provide executive with faster, more dynamic and 100% trusted insight.

About Wessanen

Wessanen is a food enterprise, with a focus on organic products. In 2015, it celebrated its 250th birthday.

Geographies: Operations in Europe and North America

Headquarters: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Annual Turnover: 434 Million Euros

Source System: Hyperion Enterprise until 2015. From 2016 onwards: Tagetik

CXO-Cockpit Go-Live Date: 2012

CXO-Cockpit Users: 40-50 regular users

Background

Before Wessanen selected CXO-Cockpit as its performance reporting solution in 2012, the data from Hyperion Enterprise was delivered through an Excel–driven reporting process. This meant that the executive board had to base its decisions on unwieldy stacks of paper every month. Laura Blaauwendraad, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis, recalls: “Excel is an uncontrolled environment, with all the risks associated. This meant that my team and I would spend a signi�cant amount of time each month purely on checks and controls. And even then, we would regularly have errors creep into our reporting.”

“After we found out about CXO-Cockpit, the CFO and I were quickly convinced” said Laura Blaauwendraad. “It was going to save us a great deal of manual controlling work, avoid errors and provide the executive board with dynamic insight into the �gures and results on request as CXO-Cockpit directly leverages the data and meta data from our EPM system and makes it comprehensive.”

Implementation

Wessanen were pleasantly surprised by the prompt implementation. “When we selected CXO-Cockpit, we demanded that they could integrate with Hyperion Enterprise” said Laura Blaauwendraad. The link with the EPM system was quickly established and CXO-Cockpit was rolled out straight away. However, the company soon decided to move away from Hyperion Enterprise. “Then, continues Laura Blaauwendraad, CXO-Cockpit managed to completely reverse the situation without any delay and connect to Tagetik”.

Bene�ts

“CXO-Cockpit is actually serving more purposes than I expected in advance“ said Laura Blaauwendraad. Among the numerous bene�ts, she highlights the three most signi�cant ones.

Reporting, Visualisation and Analysis

CXO-Cockpit o�ers a wide range of possibilities for modifying the performance reporting dashboards according to user preferences and the solution can therefore be used in various ways. In the case of Wessanen, it serves as an executive self-service tool for viewing the �nancial results, as

CXO-Cockpit delivers mobile and web-based

the static Excel output of many EPM systems and

generic BI tools, the mobile CXO-Cockpit dash -

down, annotations, large reports with multiple

practices, storyboards, supervised analysis and

various output and publication functionalities.

departments of organisations throughout the

from all leading EPM systems, such as Oracle

Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), Oracle

Enterprise, Oracle Essbase, SAP Business Planning &

Consolidation (BPC), SAP Business Warehouse (BW),

Tagetik and IBM TM1.

Guided Analysis

CXO-Cockpit processes the data directly from the underlying EPM system into executive-friendly dynamic, and tailor-made reports. This means that the executive board of Wessanen has access to the �nancial results whenever and wherever they need it. They do not need to �le a request with Laura’s team, and they can have 100% con�dence that they are looking at the right data and that the reports are up-to-date.

“Additionally, with CXO-Cockpit it is easy to visualize the data” continues Laura Blaauwendraad. “The solution provides a great deal of freedom of choice in this respect. It allows me to provide people without �nancial background with clear and easy-to-understand insights into large quantities of data. People who do have �nancial background, on the other hand, get even bene�ts from the tool thanks to the advanced visualiza-tions. It gives us the possibility to o�er Guided Analysis, meaning that the users do not need to understand the underlying systems or the structure of the database to interpret and understand the data.”

Laura Blaauwendraad de�nes the contrast between the past and the current situation: “As if we switched from Yellow Pages to Google. We used to print out the reports, so if you were looking for a speci�c range of �gures, it could take quite a while to �nd them. With CXO-Cockpit, this is all quickly and visually accessible. Users, now, get the output they need at

Single source of the truth

So what are the results after several years of use? “The users of the solution are very satis�ed, because they do not have to spend as much time looking for and �nding the right information” adds Laura Blaauwendraad.

“The �nancial professionals also bene�t from it in terms of time saving, because CXO-Cockpit does part of the work that they used to do manually allowing them to spend more time on analysis and to add more value. So, we have seen e�ciency improvements on both sides. But the time saving would not be of any value if the quality of the reports and output were not guaranteed. So, this is the key bene�t for us. The quality of the data is now higher and we can say with certainty that the �gures in the dashboards are correct.

At Wessanen, CXO-Cockpit is the single source of the truth when it comes to �nancial data. Even more than this, I always say: if it is not in CXO-Cock-pit, it is not true.”

To learn more, visit: CXO-Cockpit.com

“At Wessanen, CXO-Cockpit is the ‘single source of the truth’. If it is

not in CXO-Cockpit, it is not true.”