Case Synlab
SYNLAB is Finland’s largest private producer for laboratory examinations and imaging services. SYNLAB takes care of the well-being of Finns by offering advanced, innovative and effective services for regular health monitoring and disease prevention. It produces services for the public and private sector, private healthcare providers, insurance companies, health insurance funds and private customers. The head office and main laboratory are located in Helsinki. SYNLAB uses around 160 cost centers in budgeting.
SYNLAB started using OIVALO’s budgeting system during spring 2021. The main reason for the change was to modernize the budget process, that was previously based on a large number of different Excel files. The Excel-based budgeting was considered vulnerable and the management took a lot of time, especially from the responsible persons of group’s finance.
Due the differences in Excel sheets, summing up the numbers at the group level was almost entirely done manually. It went so far, that the numbers for the budget had to be recorded to Excel at a higher level, to reduce the time spent on manual combining work.
“Transitioning to OIVALO was so easy that even the most devoted Excel user didn’t resist the change.”
The project to transfer to SYNLAB budgeting process into Oivalo platform was very fast. The initial planning was done in a two-hours meeting, and after about a week, everyone in SYNLAB Finland had the opportunity to record their budgeting figures by using OIVALO’s cloud-based budgeting system.
There was hardly any resistance to change. Quite the contrary, the new service was especially liked by the most skilled Excel users. In addition, the end users were relieved by the fact that in the new model they could modify the Excel the most suitable time for them -without need to wait while other users had the excels locked for their modifications.
“Budgeting process management is about hundred times easier than before”
At the finance department, the implementation of OIVALO allowed more time to be used for the most important financial and reporting work. There is now a possibility to use much more time to build relevant Power BI reports, and the controllers focus their time on analyzing the numbers. Managing the process is “100 times easier” and enables the budgeting to be a lot faster and forecasting a lot effortless compared when working with Excels.
In SYNLAB, OIVALO’s budgeting platform is tightly integrated with Power BI. During the beginning of budgeting and forecasting period, the actuals from previous year are brought from Power BI to OIVALO. And other way around, budgets by cost centers are shown in Power BI next to actuals. As all the numbers are originated from cloud base platform, it’s possible to include both budgeted and actual figures into all reports at the level of different cost centers as well as whole group.
Benefits of OIVALO identified by SYNLAB
- More time spent on financial analyses than Excel validation
- Reducing human errors during budgeting
- Speeding up the budgeting process
- Comparison of actuals to budgeted without added manual work