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With continuing fast growth, Medius took the decision to restructure its organisation into a group. As a consequence, the company found that its financial consolidation processes became too slow and cumbersome to support its future development. New reporting requirements resulting from Medius’ new status as a private corporation added to the urgency of the situation: the company needed to find a way to simplify and accelerate financial consolidation.

Medius aimed at finding a future-proof way to handle the consolidation process and at the same time gain a more detailed view of financial performance across the entire group. As a mid-sized company, Medius wanted a flexible solution that would scale up without being too complicated and costly. It evaluated a number of products, including IBM Cognos Controller and a solution from OCRA, a Swedish vendor. The decision was made in favour of IBM Cognos Controller, because it matched the company’s requirements much more closely than other solutions on the market.

“We realised that IBM Cognos Controller could give us everything that we actually needed, without overcomplicating the situation,” remembers Eva Eriksson, CFO at Medius AB. “After we saw a demonstration of how the solution works, we were convinced that Cognos would be the right choice for us.”

For the implementation of IBM Cognos Controller, Medius worked with IBM Business Partner Addedo. After identifying what Medius wanted to achieve and specifying the balance sheet calculations that should be implemented, the project was realised very quickly.

During the design and implementation phases, the Addedo consultant used her specific knowledge and experience to help Medius leverage the solution to meet the requirements perfectly. After just eight consulting days even all testing was completed and the solution went live, beginning with two quality assurance periods, before the solution was finally put into production.

“As a solution built by finance professionals for finance professionals, IBM Cognos Controller includes all functionality needed in a group environment,” adds Susan Hartley, Senior Consultant at Addedo. “From our experience of numerous implementations at small and medium-sized businesses, Cognos solutions suit smaller companies just as well as larger ones. Our estimate for the implementation at Medius was ten days. In close collaboration with Eva and her team who were all well prepared and highly motivated to improve the financial performance management model and solution, we managed to get the system ready for production in just eight days. This proves that advanced finance solutions don’t need to involve long and expensive implementation and deployment phases, but can deliver significant improvements quickly. High expectations and strong commitment on both sides made this project a success.”

Medius plans to extend the solution to allow more users (including the accounting staff of all geographically dispersed Medius subsidiaries) to contribute and interact directly with Cognos Controller, which will speed up consolidation and reporting processes even further. Additionally, Medius plans to use Cognos Controller for budgeting. The company is also considering connecting a data warehouse solution to Cognos for tighter integration and deeper analytical insights.

Eva Eriksson concludes: “Working with Addedo to implement IBM Cognos Controller has already improved our financial consolidation and reporting processes significantly. We now are able to get more detailed reports faster and spend more time analysing the figures instead of just collecting and calculating them. Because an enterprise-scale solution like Cognos can grow with the company, it has enabled us to optimise and standardise our crucial financial processes before our old spreadsheet-based approach became too complex and unmanageable.”

Contact

Johan Berggårdh, Managing Partner, Addedo Ab
Mobile: +46 70 321 77 32
Email: johan.berggardh@addedo.com

Susan Hartley, Senior Consultant, Addedo Sweden
Mobile +46 70 972 84 49
Email: susan.hartley@addedo.com

Eva Eriksson, CFO, Medius
Phone +46 13 106334
Email: eva.eriksson@medius.se

About Medius AB
Medius AB is a fast-growing IT company headquartered in Sweden, which develops and sells world-leading purchase-to-pay and invoice automation software solutions. The company subsidiaries and provides services in twelve countries around the world, with a special focus on Europe. The Medius group employs about 150 people and generate revenues of 140 million SEK (€15.7 million).

About Addedo
Addedo is a fast growing international consultancy. Its consultants work primarily for the CFO and Group Finance function, but also for LOB Managers. Through its management, application and interim consultancy, Addedo helps its customers gain better insight into their business performance. Specifically it helps customers improve on their reporting, consolidation, planning, budget and analysis processes and systems.

Addedo has offices in London, Malmo, Stockholm and Zug. Many of its consultants are however engaged in projects across the world, serving a large client base ranging from emerging business to the largest Fortune 3500. Addedo is partner-owned, and all shareholders are operative in the company. It strives to be the pan-European consultancy partner to Group Finance.