Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

55 “Vena is probably the best professional decision that I’ve made in my career” MAT T B L I C K L E Y, COCA - COL A CONSOL I DAT ED Not only does Vena Complete Planning help customers improve their forecasting and there- fore their decision-making, it also helps users to mitigate risk. “There are a few ways of looking at this,” says Grover. “For example, there is a risk of low user adoption with any solution. You can buy the best technology in the world, but if your users don’t adopt it, it could be the worst. Because Excel is so familiar to our customers, user adoption is generally very good.” Grover believes that Vena’s platform can also mitigate risk because it enables users to get a much closer look at all their metrics, data and forecasting material. “With Vena Extended Planning, customers can access a new level of detail based on a wealth of financial and opera- tional data that better informs plans and refore- casting,” he explains. The platform also integrates with Power BI, which further helps users to identify trends and insights from this data. “Power BI is by far the world leader in business intelligence tech- nology and has a lot of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) built into it,” says Grover. “But ML and AI are only as good as the data they use. “So, the fact that we can do finance-led and extended planning, consolidating all that data from source systems at that detailed level, these systems can now give me a lot of insight into my data. It can detect correlations and anomalies in the data, really bringing this information to life.” Among Vena’s over 1,000 customers is Coca- Cola Consolidated. As the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the US, with 76 distribution centres and 17,000 employees, the business wanted a solution to make business planning easier and more collaborative. With the foundation in Excel as a major factor, the firm decided to use Vena Complete Planning, which integrated with existing source systems, automated data consol- idation and brought the entire cross-functional planning process into one central solution. “The information we generate is being used across the business to better understand results and to make better business decisions,” says Matt Blickley, vice president of FP&A at Coca-Cola Consolidated. “Vena is probably the best profes- sional decision that I’ve made in my career.”