Revolutionizing Finance Reporting:
Ineos Inovyn’s Transformation Journey for Fixed Costs

How it all started

In March 2021, Ineos Inovyn’s finance team identified that a considerable amount of time was being spent on manual tasks, such as copying and pasting data in Excel spreadsheets, endless email communications, … This was strongly hindering the efficiency of the Forecast, Budget & Monthly closing process. Determined to enhance efficiency, Inovyn initiated a finance improvement project aimed at automating the process of collecting, gathering, transforming and displaying data.

The adoption of a Business Intelligence (BI) solution emerged as a key component to streamline the reporting process, and Inovyn started looking for a partner to guide them in selecting and implementing the best solution meeting their current and future needs. After a careful selection process, Inovyn and Agilos started working together in June 2022.

The journey started with an analysis of different Data Integration and Data Visualization technologies. It was conducted under a short period of time and allowed to gather the understanding of all stakeholders of this project. For example, the IT team pushed to adopt a more corporate vision, and look for a solution that could also fit other departments’ needs (operations, logistics, sales, purchasing).

Four comprehensive pilots were executed, covering fixed costs, fixed assets, inventory management, and credit management. The purpose of these pilots was to demonstrate the feasibility of the project, test and confirm that the identified solutions meet the expectations and business needs of Inovyn, and help to prepare for the full implementation of the project.

Automated analytics for fixed costs

The need for automated analytics for fixed costs was obvious: Inovyn had over 700 million of fixed costs, managed fully manually. Previously, on a monthly basis, each local controller had to perform a manual extraction of fixed costs from SAP in Excel and manually prepare a submission file for QlikView in order to have a reporting ready. Each country had also developed their own SQL or Access database to follow-up on budgets and actuals. On the other hand, the forecasting process was executed in Excel but with copy/pasting of data to prepare the submission of it for around 50 legal entities.

Having Actuals & Forecast data gathered in the same reporting was another heavy manual process that could only be performed by very few collaborators because of its complexity.

It became clear that this process needed improvement: thus time to develop a centralized and fully automated tool! Together with Agilos, Ineos Inovyn decided to implement one centralized Data Lake in Snowflake to replace local databases, automatically connected to SAP in order to stop with all manual exports. Qlik Data Integration was hence chosen to automate the end-to-end replication process and designing the warehouse. One of the reasons this solution was selected is because of its strength to integrate with SAP. 

To improve the quality of the forecast process, involving not less than 350 people and previously fully managed in Excel, a new solution was implemented that keeps the Excel look & feel for the end-users, but automatically builds a structured and ready-to-use source table for the Datawarehouse.

“Agilos really helped us in the decision process for this end-to-end solution: next to the demos we had on different tools to show all the possibilities for charts / reports / …, they also made us reflect on our current and future reporting needs. Hence, we are now using a solution that perfectly suits our environment and made us optimize our finance process.”, said Natacha Melchior, CFO at Inovyn.

Underlying architecture for accurate and up-to-date analytics

The implemented solution consists in a Change Data Capture Replication of SAP ERP systems into a Cloud Data Platform. This platform is designed to have a landing zone (Raw Data Replication) and a Datawarehouse zone.

The use of pre-built SAP accelerators (Order-to-Cash, Financial Analytics & Inventory Management) allows a fast development phase and rapid delivery of first results consisting in Dashboards for the financial monthly closing process.

The results

The result of this project is a more efficient and faster closing process, freeing up time for the real analysis of the figures. Thanks to the efficiency of the implemented tools, Inovyn can now benefit from significant time savings, equivalent to 5,600 hours or 3.5 full-time equivalents. The data refresh has also been drastically reduced from 2 hours to around every 15 minutes. The manual work for all controllers and local CFOs has been reduced and they are now able to work on more valuable tasks.

Natacha Melchior: “We are very happy to have implemented an end-to-end solution that perfectly suits our current and future reporting needs in terms of fixed costs, capex, inventory and customer tracking, sales analysis, etc.

One of the most crucial aspects of this project was the involvement of Agilos as strategic partner: they have supported us from the beginning to the end, recommending out-of-the-box solutions that range from data integration to visualization and much more.

Key success factors of the project include the fact that it was a co-driven project with implications from business and IT side, and with weekly debriefing meetings to immediately react on certain aspects. My main key take-away would be to have a clear description of the reporting needs and a clear vision of the final results: it really helps the development cycle to be carried out quickly.”

The collaboration between Inovyn and Agilos resulted in a streamlined, automated, and efficient finance reporting system. The implementation of Qlik Data Integration, Snowflake, Smartsheet, and Qlik Sense not only met the project objectives but also paved the way for enhanced analytical capabilities and valuable time savings for Inovyn's finance teams.